Narrating Abortion: The History of Abortion Stories in Ms. Magazine

The public telling of personal abortion stories has been a crucial aspect of feminist activism for reproductive rights since the early 1970s. Feminists present these stories in the service of normalizing abortion and illustrating its centrality to gender equality and social health. As abortion policies, media technologies, and feminist theorizations of reproduction have changed over time, the types of stories, who tells them, and how they are told have changed as well. Since 1972, when Ms. magazine published its “We Have Had Abortions” petition signed by 53 prominent women, which is credited with helping to mainstream the push for abortion rights, Ms. has been a crucial purveyor of abortion stories in the service of feminist activism, abortion access, and reproductive justice. Attempting to “disrupt cultural hegemony from the inside,” Ms. represents the popularization of the feminist movement through a print publication with national circulation (Farrell 1998, 16). This paper examines the full archive of print issues of Ms. to understand what abortion stories appear, their frequency, how they have changed over time in conjunction with shifting politics and social context, and what role they have played in the feminist and reproductive justice movements. In the post-Dobb United States, when abortion stories that showcase the deleterious effect of abortion bans on women with “wanted” pregnancies proliferate, and when people of reproductive age are too young remember the decades of feminist work done to secure and protect the right to “elective” abortion care, scholars, advocates, and the public could benefit from a greater awareness of how feminists have deployed abortion stories over time.