This interview appears in full at Ms. magazine. Tune in to Looking Back, Moving Forward for more.

Renee Bracey Sherman wants you to tell your abortion story—and take down white supremacist patriarchy in the process.

The founder and executive director of We Testify has spent more than a decade cultivating spaces to celebrate, honor and hold those who have had abortions. The co-host of The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion and co-author of Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve also sees that work as a way to challenge the racist and sexist history of antiabortion policies—and confront the ways those legacies continue to shape the reproductive lives of all of us, especially those at the intersections of gender, race and class.

In the second episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward—a Ms. podcast exploring the history of the magazine and the feminist movement—Bracey Sherman talked to me about the power of abortion storytelling, why confronting white supremacy is necessary to defend abortion access, and how we can all stand in solidarity with people who have had abortions. 

The way in which our nation criminalizes life, you don’t have a house and you sleep outside, go to jail. You don’t have enough money to buy food and you steal food, go to jail. You don’t have healthcare or education and health insurance fraud, whatever that is, and enroll your kids in the wrong school and it’s not in your neighborhood, you can go to jail. These are things that people have been arrested for, criminalized for, and they make certain things a crime so that they can go after certain populations and make them behave in a certain way. Abortion is a piece of that.

In the history of abortion, every single time there is a wave of criminalization of abortion, it’s at the same time that the people in power, the forces that be, are concerned about losing power and white people losing power.

It is a way to ensure that white people will continue to have babies and behave within this hetero-patriarchal system, but also that Black and brown people’s reproduction is subject to criminalization and only exists to further capitalism and white supremacy. Understanding how all of that works together and how criminalization works with that, then you start to understand, oh, wow that’s why you’ll never find someone who is antiabortion, but pro-birthright citizenship or pro-queer families, pro-IVF. At the end of the day, they actually believe there is a specific way to raise a family—and a right, white, way.

Part of how we got to this moment—yes, Project 2025 and all of those things—but the slippery slope that got us there was even the Democrats, and folks in the middle, believing the lie of white supremacy and the American dream, and there’s a right way to have children, and if you just do it the right way, then you’ll be fine. They believed that lie, so then they allowed different bans and restrictions to be put into place—because at the end of the day, they felt like, the right people will still be able to get access to their care.

Well, guess what? Now we’ve got folks who have miscarriages who can’t get mifepristone or misoprostol and are being criminalized for the outcomes of their pregnancy. We have folks who need abortions later in pregnancy for health indications, and they also can’t get it, because the exceptions don’t work. Because they sold you a lie that if they only criminalize these people who are unworthy everyone else will be fine—but no, that was actually the way to get to you, too.

We need to stop believing in this idea of there’s a right way of anything or exceptionalism, and actually just let people be. Let people make their families on their own terms, and ensure that everyone has what they need, and stop criminalizing people for how they raise their children or the outcomes of their pregnancies. Stop going after Black and brown families for simply existing. Stop going after queer families for simply existing.

And white people, especially wealthy and upper-class white people: Stop thinking that you’re the exception and you’re different than the rest of us. Because you’re not. Now, you’re stuck in this shit with the rest of us because you thought you were different and guess what? Your whiteness didn’t protect you.

My hope is that they’ll actually figure that out and believe it this time.

Renee Bracey Sherman

Read more at Ms. magazine.