At the center of The Meteor’s newest podcast, The A: Files A Secret History of Abortion, are two friends — friends who talk about abortion a lot. Hosts Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone are reproductive justice experts who have been at the forefront of abortion storytelling for years. While conversations about abortions among the people who have them often happen in private, Mahone and Bracey Sherman are dedicated to bringing those conversations into the light in hopes of normalizing both the topic and the conversations that so many friends like them have.
The podcast, which launched with two episodes on January 17, is determined to dispel some common myths about abortion, while also diving into the way society has stigmatized the topic in pop culture and beyond. Bracey Sherman and Mahone will tackle issues ranging from racial justice, to disabled people’s rights, to gerrymandering.
“We’re being sold a lie about abortion and the only way to fix the situation is to understand its history and get organized—at the polls and in our communities every day,” said Bracey Sherman and Mahone.
Teen Vogue caught up with the hosts prior to the launch to talk about the podcast’s inception, the importance of centering Black women in abortion conversations, and the need to dismantle common abortion misperceptions.
Teen Vogue: Both of you have an expansive history in reproductive justice. How did you get the idea to start a podcast, and how did it come to be?
Regina Mahone: I think I’m going to take a step back and then I’ll go forward, just to talk about how Renee and I met, because that’s a part of our story too. So, Renee and I met when I was an editor at Rewire News Group, which is a publication that unapologetically reports on abortion access and reproductive justice. I had edited Renee a few times and had also started seeing her a lot at different progressive conferences and decided I just wanted to be her friend and get to know her better. I had always been in awe of how she shows up for people who have abortions while centering love and care. So when I was in her neighborhood in Washington D.C. one week, I reached out to see if she wanted to have dinner. She said yes, and we’ve been pretty close friends ever since. When this opportunity for a podcast came up, it was after Renee had appeared on another podcast with Ms. Gloria Steinem. Renee was incredible and The Meteor approached her about starting a podcast, she asked me if I would like to be a part of it and I had zero hesitations. Just an opportunity to do a podcast where we could show up as we are – two friends who talk about abortion a lot.
We’ve been having all these conversations for our book, which comes out later this year –LIBERATING ABORTION: Our Legacy, Stories, and Vision for How We Save Us – so doing the podcast at the time we were wrapping up creating the book allowed us to turn the conversation we had already been having into this resource for other people looking to know more about this history, advocate on behalf of people who have abortions, and really just unearth all the things that have really been kept hidden, not spoken really spoken out loud in a way that these issues and intersections deserve to be.
Renee Bracey Sherman: I think that’s what is the basis of our relationship, our book, and particularly this podcast. It’s quite rare to hear people who have abortions talking amongst ourselves. We literally say it in the opening of the podcast – we’re two friends who talk about abortion a lot, and it’s true. I think that’s how we think abortion should be talked about – among friends, and it’s just normal.
TV: Having conversations about abortion and reproductive justice are already tough, but it kind of gets more taboo when you talk about it in the Black community. How did you all become more comfortable with speaking about it?
RM: Growing up, for me, we didn’t talk about abortions. People had abortions, no one really discussed them. So when I had my abortion, I was in my late 20s, I didn’t discuss it with my family members or reach out to them for help. I felt like it was a thing I needed to deal with on my own. It happened not long before I started working at Rewire and I met Renee, so once I started gaining a deeper understanding of how abortion stigma works and it plays such a huge role in where we are, that’s how I started just talking more. Also in seeing how Renee was writing about and talking about her abortion, that’s when I started to talk about my experience.
[Abortion] made becoming a mother possible. It made me want to get ready to start my family. So, in the first episode of the podcast, me and Renee do dig into our personal backgrounds with abortion, and these false stereotypes about Black women that you were talking about caused harm in our communities. Like there’s something wrong with being a Black single mother, when it’s all these laws that have actually made it harder for people who are single parents to support their families, parent their families – the list continues.
RBS: I don’t know if you ever heard of this, but when I was in high school, people would be like, “oh abortion, it’s a white girl way out,” or “it’s a white girl issue,” even though the majority of people that have abortions are people of color. When I learned that statistic it just blew my mind. So that’s where I was like, "no. We have to talk about this.” And then, of course, I feel like we’re often written out of history. That’s what I think is so beautiful about the podcast, is that we are Black women talking about it, writing ourselves back into history, really getting people to feel comfortable, and that you cannot talk about abortion without talking about our own experiences, and race, and all that comes with it.
RM: Renee, I’m so glad that you brought that up because this is something we’ve discovered in doing all the research that we’ve been doing for the podcast. Since ancient times people of all different cultural backgrounds and racial groups have practiced abortion. So the very fact that abortion has become something to regulate or ban is one of the first lies or misperceptions about abortions that we do unpack on our podcast, because abortion is healthcare.
TV: In doing your research and narrowing down what you all wanted to cover, are there any more [misperceptions] that you’ve seen pushed to the forefront, specifically involving Black women?
RBS: I think one of the things is the prevalence of criminalization. In our episode with Rafa Kidvai, we talk about criminalization and people sort of have this idea like “if we make abortion illegal, people then just won’t choose it.” But that’s not true. People will always need abortions – they’ve always needed abortions. So what they’re going to do is try and find a way, right? But what happens when you make something illegal is it becomes a crime and it’s punishable, right? But what ends up happening in particular is how this impacts Black and brown people. We know that our communities are over-policed, that they’re over-surveilled, and so I think that because people think that banning abortions just means people just won’t have it, [they don’t recognize] how much it’s actually going to hurt Black and brown communities the most.
RM: As Renee was talking, I was sitting here thinking about our episode where we talk about class and how abortion has been separated out from healthcare. It started with this idea that low-income people in this country don’t deserve equal access to quality healthcare. Of course this is building off of the way that all of our systems in this country are rooted in racism and “separate but equal” services and access to healthcare. So we talked about this in our episode, questioning the idea that there are good states and bad states, but what’s happened is the chipping away of access for some people.
TV: Can you elaborate on why it’s important to center Black women in these conversations about abortion and reproductive justice, considering we have historically been left out of conversations when it comes to the voting rights movement, feminism, and things of that nature.
RM: I like this question, because by asking it you’re centering our voices and our experiences, so I appreciate it so much. But of course we know that in the very beginning it wasn’t just abortion that was attacked – it was our whole lives being attacked. Decisions on whether or not to become parents, our decisions once we become parents, to parent our children in safe and healthy neighborhoods, and so if you’re talking about addressing these issues from a reproductive justice framework and you can lift up the people who are the most marginalized within that framework, within our society, then everyone else will see the benefits of it.
RBS: The way I come to this is that it’s always [a question of] who gets attacked first? It’s always Black folks. Like where do these negative myths about pregnancy, and parenting, and what a bad parent looks like [come from]? Politicians always conjure an image of a Black woman. The misogynoir, the anti-Blackness, is baked into these feelings. But if you look at it, as we talk about in the first podcast episode, it is literally the history of the modern anti-abortion movement, and the original anti-abortion movement, because they were specifically concerned in the 1860s about not being in control and having enough white people to outnumber and literally maintain power over what group that was recently freed in the 1860s? Black people.
So what we have seen is that the anti-abortion backlash always comes as a result of racial progress, in particular for Black people.
Again. If you actually paid [attention] to the misogynoir, you paid attention to making sure that Black and brown people had the reproductive freedom that they wanted and needed, then you would be able to unlock the key for all of these other issues [like gerrymandering]. But, you have to first give a sh*t about Black women, and Black people overall.
TV: What do you hope your listeners leave with when they finish an episode? What do you hope they feel empowered to do next?
RBM: It’s an election year, it’s an election year, it’s an election year. In case you didn’t know – it’s an election year. I’m an abortion activist, and as an abortion activist of color, especially as a Black abortion activist, election years are really hard. It’s one of those things where everyone likes to remind you that “Black women are the backbone of the Democratic party,” blah blah blah and all that. But the thing is that Black women are disproportionately more likely to have an abortion, yet that’s the thing that we’ve lost, and like I said, that’s the key to everything else. I’m glad that more politicians are finally listening to us. We’ve been saying for a long time that abortion is a winning issue, but they haven’t necessarily been actually taking it seriously until recently. So it is going to play a big factor in the election.
What I hope that audiences understand and get out of listening to this podcast is a different way to talk about and think about abortion – because they’re going to be talked at a lot for the next 10 months until the election. My hope is that audiences listen to our podcast and have an understanding of how to dig a little deeper and ask more thoughtful questions of those politicians.
RM:I think one of the most important takeaways for our listeners, at least it was for me as we were going through this process, is that we are going to harm the most marginalized people if we see abortion as an individual problem. The reality is that this is a community problem, and we have to address it as a community with the needs of those most affected by abortion at the center of our strategies. We talk about this a bit, I believe it’s episode six where we talk about how we address disability rights and trans rights as a movement. But that’s our hope with this podcast. These conversations that we want to spark, talking about them in a way that’s not necessarily been talked about before. Even as we’re having the politicians in their debates having these conversations about restoring protections for abortion rights, we need to see that those restoration efforts are really not going to be enough to get to the root of what we’re talking about, because they’ve never been enough.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
