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. 

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.

—Renee Bracey Sherman

Read more at Ms. magazine.