 | Sara Matthiesen Associate Professor of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies - George Washington University |
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02.08.2023-29.09.2023
Home Abortion After Roe v, Wade
While in residency at Brocher, I plan to complete drafts of chapters 1 and 3. Home Abortion after Roe v. Wade begins in the late 1960s. Chapter 1 is a history of revolutionary political frameworks offered by different abortion activists in the lead up to the Supreme Court decision. Activists ranging from Florynce Kennedy to members of the Young Lords Party to Frances Beal of the Third World Women’s Alliance to participants in the feminist health self-help movement had a far more radical vision when it came to abortion care: that abortion be "free and on demand," administered via "community control" free from the threat of sterilization abuse, and, ultimately, unregulated by the state. We know that the legal strategy of privacy rights rather than these other demands ultimately won Roe, and so I expect to find a story of how the framework of privacy rights became ascendant. Indeed, current legal histories of Roe have narrated the strategy of the privacy framework. What these histories do not tell, however, is where the radical demands of abortion care went after Roe, how activists responded to the Supreme Court decision, and how abortion mutual aid networks developed in Roe’s wake. I expect to find that activists did not uniformly celebrate the Roe ruling, and persisted in grassroots efforts that believed clinics should not be the only pathway to abortion care. This chapter will make visible political demands that have long been erased by decades of defending Roe from anti-abortion attacks and ease readers into the idea that such demands did not disappear with the 1973 decision.
While chapter 2 will examine the impact of the Hyde Amendment (legislation passed in 1976 that barred the federal funding of abortion) on grassroots abortion activism, chapter 3 looks to the emergence of transnational feminist networks of medical abortion care in the 1980s. In the 1980s, women in Brazil realized that an ulcer medication, Cytotec, the commercial name of misoprostol, could also induce a miscarriage. Feminist networks began relying on this pill to increase access to abortion despite its criminalization in the country. This strategy did not stay with Brazilian feminist networks, but was instead shared transnationally with abortion activists in the United States. In narrating these grassroots exchanges, I expect to find that grassroots knowledge of misoprostol’s effects preceded pharmaceutical companies research into what would become known as medical abortion. Public health research on debates over RU-486 (mifepristone) have overwhelmingly focused on the role of pharmaceutical companies in marketing the abortion pill. But just as with self-help methods of abortion that predated medication, activists did not simply wait for the medical establishment to teach them how to control their reproduction. Chapter 3 will detail an as yet untold transnational history of home abortion that also anticipates the contemporary enthusiasm for medical abortion in the present.
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03.04.2019-30.04.2019
Reproduction Reconceived
My objectives in this study are twofold. First, I will analyze the legal strategies developed by feminist attorneys in response to donor custody suits brought against lesbian mothers. This will entail an analysis of the related but distinct court rulings in which gay and lesbian parents were denied custody to children conceived in heterosexual marriages. The latter type of custody battle preceded the proliferation of donor insemination, and I suspect greatly influenced feminist responses to the possibility of donors bringing paternity claims. Second, I will show that this legal imperative was a significant factor in drawing lesbians pursuing motherhood into the medical marketplace of sperm banks and fertility treatment. To complete these objectives, I will draw on the extensive archival materials made available to me by individuals that participated in these projects. I will also analyze oral histories I have conducted with key players in these efforts. Lastly, I will examine the public court rulings on donor custody suits as well as the evolution of state parentage laws. Through writing the history of these developments, I aim to highlight the constraints that shaped these strategies while also exploring their unintended effects for the political project of lesbian motherhood. In doing so, I offer a case study that illustrates how the feminist health ethic of self-expertise and bodily autonomy sits uneasily alongside American liberalism’s investment in choice and privacy. This tension continues to shape contemporary debates related to ARTs as well as reproductive rights more broadly.
Sara Matthiesen (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor of history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at George Washington University. Professor Matthiesen's 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, disease, parentage laws, and poverty were worsened by state neglect in the decades following Roe. As queer, Black, poor, criminalized, and/or sick families' material conditions deteriorated, the labor required to maintain familial ties proliferated. Reproduction Reconceived reframes the decades following Roe as a labor history of family making to offer an urgent account: of the labors families were made to expend simply to survive in the face of state neglect; and of the costs that pile up when family making is regarded as a private responsibility rather than a public good. In 2022, Reproduction Reconceived was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for the best monograph on gender and labor from the National Women's Studies Association.
Professor Matthiesen is currently at work on a second project that traces the persistence of "self-managed" or home abortion practices after Roe. Her academic work has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Feminist Review. Her popular writing can be found in The Boston Review, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed, and Spectre Journal.
In addition to teaching classes on the history of gender, sexuality, and reproduction in the United States, Professor Matthiesen regularly teaches Introduction to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, for which she was awarded the Kenny Teaching Prize.
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