WOMEN & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE

Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States

A Historical Overview

By: Monica Cardenas

Unmarried women in the United States have been legally permitted to use birth control for less than 50 years. Let that sink in.  

Women’s rights have enjoyed new attention in the past few years, thanks to the #MeToo movement, the popularity of the television show Mrs. America (including rockstar portrayal of Gloria Steinem), the passing of heroic equal rights advocate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and, in a strange way, the election of Donald Trump and his series of conservative Supreme Court Justices. But for all the obvious reasons women deserve equal treatment under the law, the fight for abortion rights and even unrestricted access to reproductive health care continues. (I wonder, do men need permission from the U.S. government to choose to disengage from a pregnancy he helped create?) READ MORE

In 1970, a group of women in the Boston area self-published "Women and Their Bodies,” a 193-page booklet that dared to address sexuality and reproductive health, including abortion.