“Free Abortion on Demand” After Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States
Sara Matthiesen (Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University)
with a response by Peter Zarrow (History, UConn)
Wednesday March 26, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022, many abortion rights activists responded with the slogan “Roe was never enough!” The phrase invoked a reality that had long defined legal abortion in the U.S.: Roe’s standing did not translate into widespread access to the procedure. But exactly how long have supporters of abortion rights wielded this criticism of Roe, and what would the feminist movement for legalization have thought about this rallying cry? In this talk, Professor Sara Matthiesen recovers feminist responses to the legalization of abortion in 1973, and asks what their varied assessments can teach us about the contemporary struggle over bodily autonomy.
Sara Matthiesen is Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at George Washington University. Her first book, Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021), shows how incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, HIV/AIDS, parentage laws, and poverty were worsened by state neglect in the decades following Roe. In 2022, Reproduction Reconceived received the Sara A. Whaley Prize for best monograph on gender and labor from National Women’s Studies Association. Professor Matthiesen’s current project, “‘Free Abortion on Demand’ after Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States,” traces the multi-racial feminist activism that opposed state and medical control of abortion throughout the era of choice. At GWU, she regularly teaches Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, for which she was awarded the Kenny Teaching Prize in 2022.
Peter Zarrow’s research focuses on modern Chinese thought and culture. He has written on major intellectual figures and political movements in the late Qing and Republican periods (1880s–1949), such as Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, Cai Yuanpei, Kang Youwei, and others, as well as anarchism, Marxism, and conservatism. His most recent monograph is Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880-1940 (SUNY Press, 2021), and he recently published a translation of essay by Liang Qichao, Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Random House, 2023).
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.
