‘When Arizona’s state Supreme Court temporarily restored an 1864 abortion ban in April, many politicians and journalists lamented a return to the ‘Dark Ages’, noting that the law was written before women had the right to vote. What was left out of the discussion however, was that Black people at that time were being forced to reproduce while having no rights over their own children. This is typical of a country that has overlooked the insidious racist history behind abortion bans.

Within the history of our societies, restrictions on abortion are a relatively new-fangled invention. For centuries, abortion was seen as a common part of healthcare. From ancient times, and throughout the ‘Dark Ages’, herbs and teas were regularly taken to unblock menses and set a body back to its norm. Without modern day pregnancy tests, being with child was determined by the pregnant person themselves when they felt the first foetal movements, also known as ‘quickening’. Termination of a pregnancy at that point was considered an abortion. Stigma towards and restrictions on abortion largely arrived with colonization, as a way to control the reproduction of Indigenous communities whose lands the colonizers wanted to steal and Black people whose labour and reproduction enslavers wanted to profit from.1,2 Abortion was stigmatized then, but it wasn’t made a crime until the 19th century.