Today we’re reading a piece from RH Reality Check that expands on everything we’ve read so far about abortion as black genocide. The Road to Roe: Paved with Bodies of Women of Color and the Legal Activism of African Americans highlights the major role that African American activists played in securing abortion rights in the United States – a role that is erased by the assertion that African American women who have abortions have fallen prey to a genocidal conspiracy. Cynthia R. Greenlee writes:

As a historian, I amplify these echoes as reminders that the abortion movement was never monochromatically white. We can ill-afford these silences at a time when women’s actions during pregnancy—whether choosing home birth, drug use, or merely delivering a stillborn child—are criminalized. These silences cannot persist when keeping abortion legal and accessible is a constant struggle. And, as anti-choice factions assert that the most dangerous place for black children is in their mothers’ wombs, we must acknowledge that these battles are waged on the terrain of black women’s bodies. And that’s a terrain I’m not willing to cede.