This experimental roundtable brings two eminent historians of abortion -- Elizabeth O'Brien, a Mexican history specialist, and Michele Rivkin-Fish, an anthropologist with expertise in Soviet/Russian history -- into conversation with the five historians who co-authored the *American Historical Review* Forum (March 2026) on "Traveling Histories of Abortion." The co-authors include Natalie L. Kimball, Lina-Maria Murillo, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, Mytheli Sreenivas, and Lynn M. Thomas whose combined historical expertise spans Bolivia, the US/Mexico borderlands, China, South Asia, and Eastern and Southern Africa. O'Brien and Rivkin-Fish will each offer 10-minute commentaries on the published *AHR* Forum and then pose questions to the co-authors, before opening the floor to comments and questions from the audience.

By incorporating perspectives from Mexican and Soviet/Russian history, this roundtable will expand the driving motivation behind the "Traveling Histories of Abortion" Forum: to de-provincialize historical discussions of abortion by demonstrating how the history of abortion in the United States -- especially since the mid-20th century onwards -- has been deeply entangled with histories of gender and economic inequality, racial dispossession, imperial ambitions, and transnational influences in other places.

Too often commentators and pundits tell the story of abortion as a national saga of the recent past, a story of U.S. women struggling for bodily autonomy since the late 1960s and the New Right emerging to oppose them. The six essays comprising the *AHR* Forum challenge that narrow view by foregrounding traveling histories of abortion over fractured domestic landscapes and across international borders. We highlight three forums of travel. The first is by abortion seekers and providers, people who moved to access and enable services. They traveled to skirt legal restrictions and obtain or provide safer and more affordable procedures. The second is globetrotting beliefs, ideas, and social movements. These included Catholicism, racial nationalism, and biomedicine, and later, socialism, eugenics, family planning, feminism, and conservative forms of Protestantism and Islam. We consider how religious and secular perspectives landed in different places, blending with local, national, and regional particularities to reshape the many meanings of abortion. Finally, we argue that traveling technologies have been vital to border-crossing struggles over abortion. Four essays consider the international development and circulation of vacuum aspiration technologies for performing abortions, and one examines US reformers’ promotion of a birth control foam to curb population growth in Brown and Black communities at home and abroad. Rather than analyzing these technologies as determinative of historical outcomes, we track their movements and varied appropriations to elucidate connections and disjunctures between different locales.

Our proposed AHA roundtable will encourage reflections upon and expand the intellectual impact of 2026 *AHR* Forum on "Traveling Histories of Abortion" by bringing the five original co-authors into conversation with scholars possessing expertise on the history of abortion in other parts of the world and with the audience members who, no doubt, will possess additional forms of expertise and fresh perspectives. We expect audience members to include people interested in the history of women, gender, reproduction, and race from comparative, transnational, and global vantage points.