NEXT MEETING:
May 15, 2025
7PM EST
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Our next book:
Liberating Abortion by Renee Bracey Sherman & Regina Mahone
People of color have been having abortions since the dawn of time, yet our access is continuously under attack. In Liberating Abortion, award-winning abortion activist Renee Bracey Sherman and journalist Regina Mahone illustrate the long racist history that brought us to this moment, uncover the hidden figures who set the foundation that activists and storytellers are building on today, and explain how abortion has been and remains essential to the health of our communities.
Liberating Abortion will take you back to the basics of sex education, detailing the traditions of abortion over centuries while examining how society makes us feel about our experiences. You’ll find rigorous research, never-before-heard stories, and eye-opening interviews with more than fifty people of color who’ve had abortions, including activists, actresses, television writers, politicians, and two Black members of Jane, the Chicago feminist service that provided abortions before Roe.
With poignant storytelling and precise analysis, Liberating Abortion will change how you think about abortion forever.
Past Books:
The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service
The Story of Jane recounts the evolution of the Abortion Counseling Service, code name Jane, the underground group of heroic women that provided low-cost abortion services in Chicago in the years before the procedure was legalized. Organized in 1969 and active until the opening of the first legal abortion clinics in 1973, Jane initially counseled women and referred them to abortion providers who set prices and conditions. As Jane grew, so did the group's capacity to protect its clients. Eventually, determined to reclaim women's reproductive power in any way they were able, many members of Jane learned to perform abortions themselves.
Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts
Killing the Black Body remains a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women. It is as crucial as ever, even two decades after its original publication.
In 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race. In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas
Bodies on the Line by Lauren Rankin
On Monday, June 12th we met to discuss Lauren Rankin’s book, Bodies on the Line: At the Front Lines of the Fight to Protect Abortion in America.
Incisive and eye-opening, Bodies on the Line makes a clear case that the right to an abortion is a fundamental part of human dignity. And now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v Wade, the stakes facing us all if that right disappears have never been higher. Clinic escorts — everyday volunteers who shepherd patients safely inside to receive care — are fighting on the front lines by replacing hostility with humanity. Prepared to stand up and protect abortion access as they have for decades, even in the face of terrorism and violence, clinic escorts live—and have even died—to ensure that abortion remains not only accessible but a basic human right. Their stories have never been told—until now.
