Part I: Citizenship as a short poem

The questions of citizenship emerge as first-principle contemplations in examining the colonization of indigenous lands. Seared painfully into the American geographical landscape and the flesh of its soil, is the marching of multiple Trail(s) of Tears (National Park Service, 2024, Satz, Reference Satz1989). Indigenous mothers, fathers, elders, children, and babies on what would be a death march for some and tale of displacement for others. Serious scrutiny of the question of what it means to be a citizen in the United States must contend with forced removal, displacement, settler colonialism, and genocide. It must query the legitimacy of legal justifications instantiated within American law, such as manifest destiny, and the Federal Indian Removal Policy. To scrutinize what it means to be a citizen and study this question from the lens of Indigenous peoples, means contending with Andrew Jackson’s horrific agenda and a march of 1,000 miles (National Archives 2022) off one’s lands out of fear and helplessness.

Today, what it means to be a citizen is challenged in myriad ways. How does one reconcile what it means to be a citizen, when aspects of freedom, equality, full personhood are denied to groups based on their sex, sexual identity, race, or ability? The current U.S. president, Donald Trump, issued an executive order imposing limitations on birthright citizenship (Executive Order No. 14160, 2025). In nearly half of U.S. states, women and girls are denied legal rights and protections involving their bodies (Forouzan and Mariappuram Reference Forouzan and Mariappuram2024). Yet, in those very same states, notions of citizenship are being expanded in ways that are illogical to legal norms and the rule of law. For example, in Alabama, the Supreme Court has determined that embryos – a set of cells – sometimes cryopreserved in glass tubes – are people. Presumably to the Justices, they are “people” in the state of Alabama and as such citizens of Alabama (LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, 2024).

According to Webster’s dictionary, the etymology of the word citizen links to the Middle English: citizein, from Anglo-French citezein, alteration of citeien, from cité city (Merriam-Webster 2025). Today, it is defined as: “a native or naturalized person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to protection from it” or “member of a state.” But what it means to belong to a city, state, land, country is being tested all around the world. What it means to belong is tested in these lands.

How would indigenous peoples around the world answer the question of what it means to belong? What it means to be a citizen? The Maori, Aborigine, the Berbers, the Ladakhi, or locally, Lakota, the Sioux, Ho-Chunk, Navajo, Potawatomy, Inuit, etc.

How would Gazans define what it means to be a citizen? When your home becomes rubble as the world watches (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2025)? As schools, museums, places of worship, the bridge that carries you to and from no longer exists. As death mounts and the vast number is met with numbness? What does it mean to be a citizen when you have a flag, but no official statehood? Or no statehood recognized by those that recognize statehood?

In Sudan, a place devastated by tragedy, 13 million people have been forced to flee their homes in search of safety (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2025) – and the world watches. Nearly nine million people have been internally displaced. What is the value of citizenship when one is marginalized and abused in her own lands?

In Congo, where the full scale of crimes against humanity are yet to be entirely acknowledged, what does it mean to be a postcolonial citizen? Where greed and terror are breakfast and maiming is the lunch (Hochschild Reference Hochschild1998). When a foreign nation swallows you whole and spits you out, what does it mean to wake up in the colonial nightmare? (Siegal Reference Siegal2020). Sadly, the nightmares linger. Where extractions for cobalt, used for batteries and electric vehicles and consumer products and 10% of the world’s copper, 29.8 million people have been internally displaced as of 2024.

In other words, what does it mean to be a citizen in your own land, both within and without at the same time.

Part II: Property and the meaning of personhood

In 1851, one year after enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act, Sojourner Truth addressed an audience in Akron, Ohio, at the Women’s Rights Convention, to beg the question of not only what it means to be a woman but ultimately a citizen. In that powerful oration recorded as Ain’t I a Woman, Sojourner Truth (Reference Truth1851) implored the crowd of men and women gathered to consider the gravity and utter depravity of American slavery in the lives of Black women. It was an appeal not only to abolish slavery, but to understand its unique toll in the reproductive lives of Black women. Reported by newspapers and recorded throughout history, Ms. Truth stated that she had borne 13 children and seen nearly each one ripped from her arms, with no appeal to law or courts. As she explained the devastating psychological and physical toll of American slavery, she left the audience with a penetrating question: Wasn’t she a woman too?

She demanded that the crowd see her. That the women gathered empathize with her. That they see her too as a woman, rather than property.

By no means rhetorical, Truth touched on a profound matter of human rights, hotly debated in American law. Was she (and for that matter all other non-manumitted Black women) property – and therefore with no rights a court was bound to respect? Or was she a woman, and therefore entitled to the legal protections accorded white women? Was she mere property and therefore not worthy of privacy? The answers to such questions mattered not only politically but economically.

Fundamental in Truth’s speech was the quest and question of Black women’s personhood. It was also a rebuke of a system that generated profit from the sexual exploitation of Black girls and women. It called out complicity in a legal system that protected perverse transactions such as advertising children for sale and then auctioning, buying, and selling them. Perhaps the underlying answer to Truth’s query Ain’t I a Woman, was that all women, including white women had marginal legal existence.

In 1736, Sir Matthew Hale’s highly acclaimed treatise, Historia Placitorum Coronae, History of the Pleas of the Crown, declared that it was inconceivable for a woman to be raped by her husband. Hale argued that a “husband cannot be guilty of rape” because marriage conveys unconditional consent, whereby wives have entered a binding contract and “hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract” (Hale Reference Hale1736). Importantly, no prior English common law articulated this standard, but this rule found broad support among parliamentarians and subsequently influenced legal developments in the British colonies and in the United States. Nearly every state legislature enacted laws that safeguarded husbands from criminal punishment for raping their wives (and sometimes even girlfriends) (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2016, 326–31). The harmful vestiges of such principles instantiate deeply in law and remain difficult to uproot. Finally, in 1993, North Carolina rescinded its marital rape exemption.

Egregiously, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision authored by Justice Alito that struck down Roe, the Court returned to Blackstone and Hale. In doing so, the Court invoked legal theorists who refuted that women possessed any identity apart from their husbands. Hale and Blackstone also rejected the recognition of marital rape, and thus denied the principle that married women could defend themselves against sexual violations committed by their husbands. Seemingly because Hale and Blackstone espoused the view that marital rape was nonexistent so too did states’ legislatures.

Undoubtedly, Blackstone and Hale provided convenient cover for male legislators already inclined toward patriarchal interpretations of law. In a society that also embraced and greatly profited from slavery, race and sex hierarchies served as the architecture and organization of American life, not only in southern states but northern states as well. As such, invidious practices and norms became justified and maintained by laws. Problematically, American courts became complicit in upholding dangerous, patriarchal ideals and citing Blackstone and Hale in justification of invidious norms, violating what can be described as “minimal standards of the rule of law” (Postema Reference Postema2022). Applying Gerald Postema’s theory of the rule of law, American courts became complicit in laws that “embed, authorize, or encourage patterns of invidious discrimination, because they violate the core rule-of-law principle that all who are subject to law’s requirements are entitled to law’s protection (equality in the eyes of the law).”

In other words, in their advancement of the view that domestic “corrections” were unpunishable or sexual assaults nonexistent in marital relationships, such ideologies became incorporated in American jurisprudence. Lower courts came to interpret domestic violence as inoffensive to law. In North Carolina, while the Supreme Court eventually rejected the idea that wives could be subjected to whipping, the Court nonetheless maintained, “if no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty nor dangerous violence shown by the husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive” (State v. Oliver 1874, 62). In Abbott v. Abbott, the Supreme Court of Maine denied relief for a married woman whose injuries were so severe as to require hospitalization. According to the Court, the “husband and wife are one person,” and as such Mrs. Abbott was denied recovery. This sophistry extended to daughters as well.

In Roller v. Roller, the Washington Supreme Court held that it would undermine public policy if a victimized teen could recover after being serially raped by her father. Evidence of the sexual molestations was not at issue in the case, as sufficient proof was provided at the lower court adjudication. Rather, as the Justices explained, preserving domestic “harmony” took priority and manifested from the “earliest organization of civilized government … [and] inspired by the universally recognized fact that the maintenance of harmonious and proper family relations is conducive to good citizenship, and therefore the welfare of the state.” American courts twisted and distorted basic rule-of-law values to embed and maintain patriarchal conceptions in law even in the most glaring cases. Obviously, the harmony and safety of girls and women mattered very little in cases of rape and incest and courts could not be trusted to correct invidious discrimination in the most odious instances involving harms against girls and women.

Judges alleged that spousal and familial immunity responded to important policy goals, including discouraging intrafamilial litigation (Siegel Reference Siegel1996, 2165). As Reva Siegel explains, courts claimed, “[i]nterspousal litigation violated fundamental precepts of the doctrine of marital unity.” Judges ignored that minimizing marital tensions and discord for men did not alleviate tensions for women. Further, enshrining marital harmony as a priority in American jurisprudence did not serve women or remedy physical, emotional, and sexual abuse they experienced in marital homes (Goldfarb Reference Goldfarb2000). This judicial philosophy did not consider, let alone ensure, the safety, care, and betterment of women and girls.

Dorothea Dix, a prominent 19th-century activist, put it this way:

Obviously, Roe did not directly address the devastating multitude of patriarchal harms, even related to sex or concerns raised in this address. It even reeked of paternalism, tying women’s reproductive decision-making to consultations with their physicians. Nevertheless, the decision was a powerful departure from prior court rulings on matters of women’s personhood and bodily autonomy. It was a corrective to the notion that women’s destinies necessarily and fundamentally attached to sexual subordination, mothering, and providing care to men – even their husbands. Roe was a salve and acknowledgment to the invidious social, economic, educational, physical, and psychological injuries women experienced in unwanted pregnancy, childbearing, and mothering.

The Court’s turn to the past – framed as originalism – in dismantling Roe was selective, if not opportunistic. The Court’s radical conservatives pointed to specific moments in history that shaped a narrative fitting an outcome that appeared predetermined from the outset. Justice Alito highlighted states’ laws criminalizing abortion before ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, though it neglected providing a descriptive or analytical account as to why. The majority avoided glaring, inconvenient truths, including that Framers were not opposed to abortion. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin wrote about how to procure a safe abortion (Feng et al. Reference Feng, Lim and Handel2020) and Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and John Marshall, were of the view that abortion was a private, family matter (Poggi and Kiemer Reference Poggi and Kiemer2022). Neither was abortion illegal at the nation’s founding.

Notably, legislatures criminalized abortion in the period leading to the Civil War, as concerns about enslaved Black women and men becoming freed from the grips of slavery loomed (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2020). Relevantly, the Court ignored that the lobbyists who demanded criminal abortion laws – disgruntled, newly minted male obstetricians – sought to push women out of the practice of reproductive healthcare and thus monopolize the profession for themselves. Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer – a leader among them – comes to mind. He bemoaned that too few white people inhabited “the great territories of the far West, just opening to expansion, and the fertile savannas of the South, now dis[e]nthralled” due to the abolition of slavery. He queried whether those regions of the country would come to be “filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our own women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.” (Storer Reference Storer1868; Reagan Reference Reagan1997).

Rather than stamping out the vestiges of coverture, Justice Alito tellingly resurrected them, justifying Roe’s overturn by citing Blackstone, Hale, and legal theorists that advanced coverture principles – or women as property. The Court showed extreme solicitude and deference to Mississippi, a state whose notorious patterns of invidious sex and race discrimination throughout slavery and Jim Crow sadly continue to manifest in disparate rates of maternal mortality, maternal morbidity, and poverty. When the Court declared, “Roe and Casey must be overruled,” it stripped away a fundamental right on which millions of women had come to rely, including low-income Black women. The opinion will likely be remembered as one of the most haunting Supreme Court decisions ever issued, in company with Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Buck v. Bell.

Part III: Pre-Roe coverture, slavery, and Jane Crow

One decade after Sojourner Truth’s powerful demand for inclusion into citizenship, in 1861, Harriet Jacobs penned the illuminating and enduring memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs Reference Jacobs and Child1861), adding an important narrative and witness account to the canon of American history. If de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, compellingly captured the new nation’s dream, Jacobs revealed the nightmare. She presented a chilling examination of Antebellum America, captured through the lens of a child – an enslaved girl – trapped in the hungry and predatory grasps of American slavery. The despair that dripped from her pen landed in terrifying prose about sexual violence, forced pregnancies, and efforts to escape those terrifying realities. Her autobiography exposed a system of laws, practices, and behaviors far less gentle and kind, and more sinister than the labor-focused accounts of slavery that largely center men: forced, uncompensated production and harvesting of cotton, rice, tobacco, and sugar cane.

Rather, the horrors Jacobs recounts – kidnapping, sexual coercion, confinement for the purpose of sexual abuse, rape, and torture – the far too common terrors of chattel slavery demand a more nuanced view of the period. Jacobs provided a view into a largely neglected archive of American legal and social history now made increasingly relevant by the Supreme Court and contemporary debates involving forced pregnancy, reproductive freedom, and abortion.

In a letter to John Wayles Eppes on June 30, 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote,

I know no error more consuming to an estate than that of stocking farms with men almost exclusively. I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. [W]hat she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption. (Jefferson Reference Jefferson1820)

Notably, Eppes was a politician as well as a relative of the former president. At the time of Jefferson’s epistle lauding the economic gains to be wrought from exploiting Black women’s’ forced reproductive labor and servitude, Eppes had already served in the Virginia House of Delegates, as well as the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. He was also Thomas Jefferson’s nephew and an owner of enslaved people. Thus, while this was an exchange among businessmen with family ties, it was also a communication among politicians who shaped state and federal law.

Across a series of events in the 1850s and 60s, these matters would be contested and sorted at trials and even before the U.S. Supreme Court. Whether Black women were property; entitled to privacy; shared the legal status of white women – at least regarding rape, were questions that dominate the concerns of abolitionists, including those in Congress (Sumner Reference Sumner1860). By the late 1850s, the tragic narratives of women like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Margaret Garner, and Celia – a slave – among others, were central to the concerns of abolitionists. They are once more relevant in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs.

In the wake of a 10-year-old rape survivor fleeing Ohio to obtain an abortion in Indiana, mere days after Dobbs (Wolfe et al. Reference Wolfe, Dominguez, Johnston and Musa2022) like a page ripped from history, Margaret Garner comes to mind (Yanuck Reference Yanuck1953). Margaret, memorialized in Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Beloved, fled a Boone County, Kentucky plantation and the Gaines family, which claimed ownership of her. In the frigid depths of winter on January 27, 1856, at 22-years-old and pregnant, safeguarding her meager belongings, Margaret escaped on foot with her children, a mule, and companions.

Margaret’s goal was to reach Cincinnati – a key stop on the underground railroad – a place of at least temporary respite and safety for escapees brave enough to risk physical punishments – whippings, the chopping of limbs, and even death if caught for running away (Weisenburger Reference Weisenburger1998) Such cruelties were strong disincentives against attempting freedom and without federal protections Black women and girls were incredibly vulnerable. State and federal laws even punished individuals who aided and abetted so-called “runaways” or “fugitives” from slavery. In Ableman v. Booth, the Court queried whether the Wisconsin Supreme Court had the authority to issue writs of habeas corpus for the release of Sherman Booth, an abolitionist who aided in the escape of Joshua Glover, a “runaway slave,” held in federal custody in Wisconsin and ruled that it did not. In this light – once a slave always a slave regardless of the laws in other states.

Jurisdictional struggles ensued between courts regarding whose authority defined the law related to a formerly enslaved Black person in a city or town, leading famously to the 1856 and 1859 Supreme Court decisions in Ableman v. Booth and United States v. Booth. Was an enslaved person still so after escape; were they property or person?

To become free or legally recognized as “free” to govern her own body, travel, and control possessions was by no means simple. It was not enough for a woman to flee a plantation, endure an arduous journey, and reach a free state. Notably, Ohio was a “free state” on paper – but a complicated one at best. Lawmakers abolished slavery years before, and in 1841 even allowed Black people who made their way to the state to claim freedom. However, according to Julius Yanuck’s illuminating work on the Garner case, “in southern Ohio there was a marked antipathy toward abolition” and lawmakers were hostile to Black refugees, escaping the torments of slavery (Yanuck Reference Yanuck1953, 47-50).

As a border state, situated directly across the river from Kentucky, business leaders and lawmakers tolerated slaveholders who traveled interstate with their cargo of kidnapped and trafficked Black children, women, and men on their journeys north and south. As noted in prior work, “the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1793 and 1850 were exhilarants on an already raging fire, they legalized an enterprise whereby nonelite, white bounty hunters and ‘slave catchers’ traveled to northern states and territories to hunt Black people who, by skill and wit, escaped” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2021, 1081-1110). It was not uncommon nor extraordinary that bounty hunters kidnapped Black children, women, and men who had never been enslaved (Bell Reference Bell2019).

Often, they made mistakes or purposefully flouted the law, disrupting families, capturing and selling Black people never previously enslaved as far north as Boston and New York. Judges were complicit in this. Judge Richard Riker (for whom Riker’s Island is now named), was infamous in the 1800s for abusing the Fugitive Slave Act to send (or sell) African Americans in New York to slave owners in the South (Mock Reference Mock2015). Solomon Northup’s chilling memoir, Twelve Years a Slave offers a detailed and distressing account of this general practice, while Richard Bell’s powerful book, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, exposes the broader depths of the reverse underground railroad, where thousands of legally “free” Black people in the north were kidnapped and trafficked to the American south.

By January 1856, Margaret was desperate to be liberated from the sexual abuse of Archibald Gaines and the intergenerational physical abuse and psychological torment she and women in her family endured. She was the daughter of an enslaved Black woman who is believed to have raped by John Pollard Gaines, a prominent politician and her mother’s owner (Weisenburger Reference Weisenburger1998) In Weisenburger’s copiously detailed account, he describes the Gaines family tree and how “John Pollard Gaines was … the only master Margaret had known.” Being the daughter of a slaveholder did not spare Black girls and women – as they took on the status of their mothers – not their fathers, which shielded white men from economic and moral responsibility for their Black offspring and allowed them to hold their children in bondage to mortgage, rent, and sell for profit.

Among the earliest legal questions to be settled in the colonies was whether the offspring of white men and enslaved Black women were free or enslaved? Early legislation answered that the children would take the status of their enslaved mothers. This troublingly tied slavery to forced pregnancy. It tethered Black women to involuntary reproduction. It fastened capitalism to rape, embedding a horrific practice into the culture of southern economics (Hening Reference Hening1823).

By age 22, Margaret had become the victim of serial rapes and birthed at least four children. Some accounts suggest she had six births and married at 16 (Gorman Reference Gorman2013). However, it is unclear how many were the children resulting from the sexual abuse of Archibald, the younger brother of John Pollard. However, during her trial, the coroner’s jury reported that the child she murdered “was almost white, and was a little girl of rare beauty,” killed by Margaret Garner, her mother. The abolitionist, Lucy Stone Blackwell, who traveled south to meet Margaret and attend her trial, told members of the court, “The faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation female slaves submit. Rather than give her little daughter to that life, she killed it …” (Washington Reference Washington2021, 140-69).

On that frigid January evening, when the air was so cold that the Cincinnati River, usually a barrier to freedom, froze, Margaret made her escape. The river served as a literal pathway to freedom. However, Margaret’s freedom would not last long. Gaines and his party were in hot pursuit, arriving in Cincinnati early the next morning, obtaining a warrant for Margaret’s arrest under the Fugitive Slave Act. Along with his group of friends and a deputy U.S. marshal, Archibald successfully tracked Margaret down.

With Gaines and his mob approaching, Margaret grabbed a knife and slit the throat of her daughter, and then grabbed her son, “sobb[ing] that she would rather kill every one of her children than have them taken back across the river.” It is said that Margaret fought wildly, resisting capture until she was overpowered and brought down.

In an internationally covered trial, several critical legal issues arose: if an enslaved woman spent previous time in a “free state” did this confer automatic freedom for the future? If Black women’s offspring were conceived after travel to a free state did that confer freedom to the child? If an enslaved woman returned to a slave state after being in a free state was her freedom revoked?

The case was of national concern. Francis T. Chambers, who represented the slave owners, argued, “We have the Union yet, and let those who would dissolve it for the sake of the slave remember that in achieving the liberty of three millions of blacks they are periling those of twenty-four millions of the white race” (Yanuck Reference Yanuck1953, 47-50). In response, Margaret’s lawyers urged that she be charged with murder, in Ohio’s state court, which even if convicted, would keep her safer than returning to Kentucky as a slave, where she might be put to death, sold, or subjected to her pre-escape conditions: enslavement, confinement.

Margaret’s case ultimately centered on a question far beyond Gaines’ Boone County plantation and his enslaved property. If Margaret were property, she could not be guilty of killing the child. This would also suggest that she and other Black women like her were human – possessing personhood, deserving freedom, autonomy, and liberty – something that the South was unwilling to concede. If Margaret possessed personhood this would upset the troubling, unstable legal foundations on which slavery was justified – even articulated in the near-future Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people were reduced to property for their own well-being. Simply put, it was illegal for enslaved Black women to claim freedom and control of their bodies, including in matters involving sex and reproduction. They were mere property. And, property has no privacy rights nor interests to defend. After the trial, Gaines sold Margaret and her baby, shipping her south to Mississippi where she died before her 25th birthday.

Rather than isolated or rare, key aspects of Margaret’s tragedy played out for Black women throughout the South, written about by abolitionists. In 1951, Horace Mann delivered a speech on the Fugitive Slave Law, remarking “there was one girl, who after her recapture … was sold six times in seven weeks, in Maryland and Virginia for her beauty’s sake.… Like Rebecca, the jewess, she would have flung herself from the loftiest battlement, rather than yield her person to a villain” (Mann Reference Mann and Mann1851, 511-12). Representative Mann further reported, “her body was found scarred and waled with whip marks, which the villains inflicted upon her be- cause she would not come to their bed.” Equally, Representative Joshua R. Giddings brought attention to the degradations experienced by a Black woman “as she flees from the inhumanity of a worse than savage oppressor” (Giddings Reference Giddings and Giddings1853).

Part IV: Postscript citizenship: the new Jane Crow

A century after the abolition of American slavery, Fannie Lou Hamer reminded a viewing audience of the thinness of a constitution that promises equality, but rings hollow on execution and enforcement (The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, n.d.). She sat next to Dr. King at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Bravely, she began narrating the horrors of living in Mississippi while attempting to vote. She and other women being dragged off a bus, being taken to the jail that housed men. She recounted being beaten on her legs and ultimately on her head. In doing so, she described a domestic terrorism that American lawmakers for far too long refused to see. She would later remind us that citizenship and reproductive justice are hand in hand as she familiarized the world with the Mississippi appendectomy, which is no appendectomy at all, but coercive sterilization.

Sixty years later, Hamer’s plea for full citizenship remains a beacon, particularly in light of the Supreme Court dismantling reproductive freedom, and more directly, Roe v. Wade at the behest of Mississippi lawmakers. In dismantling Roe, the Court fundamentally altered women’s citizenship and constitutional freedom.

Today, tensions between free reproductive states versus non-free states or reproductive territories have reemerged now that Roe v. Wade is overturned. In the aftermath of Dobbs, there is no federal protection for abortion. And, though a strong case can be made that the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, legally protects a 10-year-old girl from forced pregnancy, the Supreme Court has craftily handed these issues back to states – just as the Court did during slavery.

Now, legal controversies over extradition, extraterritoriality, whether doctors in reproductive sanctuary states can be charged with murder after performing abortions for patients residing in non-free states, the right to travel, and lack of federal protections for girls, women, and people capable of pregnancy expose the instability of law in the wake of Dobbs.

And although over 160 years apart, the reproductive liberty interests at stake with Margaret Garner resonate today as a 10-year-old girl became a modern-day fugitive from Ohio’s abortion law, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

For all the deserved criticisms of Roe, from its trimester framework to important critiques that it centered the concerns of doctors, Roe acknowledged that unwanted motherhood could be oppressive and dangerous. The ruling directly challenged the premise that a woman’s destiny was confined to motherhood and heterosexual spousal care. The enduring profundity of Roe is that a century after Minor, Bradwell, Goodell, and the many tragic stories of forced and involuntary motherhood, during slavery, Roe articulated that motherhood and childbearing could be injurious to women. According to Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe, to force or coerce women into those destinies violated their constitutional right to privacy. Justice Blackmun wrote:

Arguably, dissatisfied with the prevailing assumption that existing criminal bans on abortion could inform the Court on the history of abortion, Blackmun undertook a rigorous empirical review. A century after Minor and Bradwell, and for the first time, the Court acknowledged that “[s]pecific and direct” injuries “medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy” may result when women are forced by the state to bear children. To have decided any differently would have been to ignore the grave medical consequences mounting at the time.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, “[t]he toll the nation’s abortion laws took on women’s lives and health in the years immediately before Roe was substantial” (Gold Reference Gold2003). Data from the era suggest that roughly one million illegal abortions took place each year, with hundreds resulting in death and numerous others requiring emergency hospital interventions (Guttmacher Reference Guttmacher1967, 420-1). Sometimes women were left infertile as a result of illegal procedures. Indeed, by the “early 1960s, [illegal] abortion-related deaths accounted for nearly half, or 42.1 percent, of the total maternal mortality in New York City” (Reagan Reference Reagan1997, 82-101). These deaths were not inevitable, but the result of harmful legal policies.

As Leslie Reagan, author of When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, describes that period, “[p]hysicians and nurses at Cook County Hospital saw nearly one hundred women come in every week for emergency treatment following their abortions.” She observed how women needlessly suffered – hemorrhaging, burns, and infections. They were the lucky ones, others died. Cook County Hospital and other medical facilities organized entire wards to address “abortion-related complications,” which impacted “[t]ens of thousands of women every year” who needed emergency care following self-induced or back-alley abortions. Deaths were particularly acute among women of color.

Similar concerns surface today – almost immediately after Dobbs. For example, the United States is now the deadliest country in the industrialized world to be pregnant. It ranks 55th in the world. Nationally, Black women are 3.5 times more likely to die due to maternal mortality than their white counterparts. In Mississippi, a Black woman is 118 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. As well, in Mississippi, Black women comprise 80% of the cardiac deaths during pregnancy.

The tragic consequences of overturning Roe were both predictable and immediate. Mere weeks after the decision, a patient in Wisconsin bled excessively, the hemorrhaging lasting more than ten days, during an incomplete miscarriage. In her case, doctors refused to intervene, fearing potential criminal and civil punishment (Sellers and Nirappil Reference Sellers and Nirappil2022). Prior to Dobbs, physicians would have relieved the pregnant woman’s suffering and terminated the pregnancy. Post Dobbs, fear interferes with the practice of medicine. In Louisiana, a woman was refused an abortion in a pregnancy where the fetus had no skull (Burke Reference Burke2022). In Florida, a teenager was denied a judicial bypass to terminate a pregnancy where the judge ruled the girl too immature to terminate a pregnancy, but strangely the result either assumes or ignores whether the girl possesses the capacity for motherhood at 16 years old.

As Judge Carlton Reeves explained in a 2018 order enjoining the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs, “legislation like H.B. 1510 is closer to the old Mississippi – the Mississippi bent on controlling women and minorities. The Mississippi that, just a few decades ago, barred women from serving on juries ‘so they may continue their service as mothers, wives, and homemakers.’” Judge Reeves described Mississippi’s actions in dismantling abortion access, while claiming it was for the benefit of women, as gaslighting.

As I close my remarks, I am reminded about the importance of gratitude and courage.

In 1827, after her so-called master failed to honor his promise to free her or to uphold the New York Anti-Slavery Law of 1827, Isabella – later renaming herself as Sojourner Truth–ran away, or, as she later informed her master, “I did not run away, I walked away by daylight …” (Women’s Rights National Historical Park 2025).