As a historian, I amplify these echoes as reminders that the abortion movement was never monochromatically white. We can ill afford these silences at a time when women’s actions during pregnancy—whether choosing home birth, drug use, or merely delivering a stillborn child—are criminalized.

On the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell discusses a topic that’s often, well, whitewashed: the contributions of African American women to reproductive rights.

Click through for stories you may never have heard about abortion as it relates to slavery, Jet, and the first black female legislators.