Summary: <p>Conservatives have long invoked the specter of the 1857 <a href="https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1201&context=jgspl">Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott vs. Sandford</a> in their fight against abortion rights, likening embryos and fetuses to slaves with no due process. Progressives now, too, are <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/in-dobbs-by-overturning-roe-and-denying-the-right-to-an-abortion-the-supreme-court-has-attacked-freedom/">drawing parallels</a> between the stripping of rights from people who may get pregnant and the infamous majority opinion penned by then-Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote, "a Black man has no rights which the white man was bound to respect." </p> <p>Missing from this historic analogy, however, are the experiences of Black women, whose enslavement and forced reproduction was fundamental to America's rise. We speak with <a href="https://womens-studies.rutgers.edu/faculty/core-faculty/148-deborah-gray-white">Dr. Deborah Gray White</a>, Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, about this not-so-distant history and the possibilities it holds for all American women. </p> <p> </p>
