While many are familiar with the pro-abortion movement’s history going back to the early 20th century, the fight for reproductive justice does not begin with Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. That is the story that Cobalt Advocate’s exhibit, “A Long Time Coming: A Reproductive HerStory of Colonial America and the United States,” seeks to tell.
“You can trace these movements to the 1800s — to the 1700s, actually,” said Dani Newsum, Cobalt’s director of senior partnerships, and one of the creators of the exhibit. “They might not be the movement we look at today, but certainly there were like-minded people who believed that women should have control over whether they were going to and how they were going to reproduce.”
The event was hosted by the Museum of Boulder on Thursday evening, its third showing so far, where dozens of community members gathered to learn about the long history of reproductive rights in America. Spread across 30 panels, Cobalt’s timeline spanned from 1619, when the first enslaved people were brought to America, to the present day, with particular attention paid to the often overlooked contributions Black and brown women have made to the cause.
“It’s important to understand who wasn’t included,” said Newsum, commenting on previous forms of the movement, such as the fight for voluntary motherhood in the 1850s and 60s. “Native American women were not included in that. Black women, enslaved or free, were not included in that. Latina Americans were generally not included.”
Cobalt, an organization that has worked to advance abortion access and reproductive rights across Colorado since the practice was first legalized in 1967, created the exhibit in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the passage of Amendment 79, which enshrined abortion access in the Colorado Constitution.
Among the panels displayed around the museum’s lobby, well-known histories such as the Loving v. Virginia and Griswold v. Connecticut decisions sat alongside lesser-known stories of the hardships faced by women before protections were put in place.
One such panel recounted the 1855 case of Missouri v. Celia: “Nineteen-year-old Celia X, an enslaved woman, was tried and convicted of killing the man who owned her in an attempt to prevent him from raping her (Celia had survived five years of her enslaver’s depraved assaults). The trial judge rejected Celia’s claim of self-defence. Under Missouri law, the rape of an enslaved person constituted a trespass, but as Celia was the legal property of her owner, the law deemed that he could not be convicted of trespass against his own ‘property.’ Celia’s sentence: Death by hanging.”
Following the exhibit and a performance of Black spiritual music by Lonnie McCabe and Dee Burleson, attendees were invited to ask questions about the exhibit and Cobalt’s work. Many noted how unfamiliar they were with the history before the 20th century, as well as the continuities between historical barriers to access and those that exist presently.
“We still have inequities in the starting points for some of our patient populations here,” said Christie Brukhart, director of facilities and infrastructure operations at Boulder Valley Health Center, regarding barriers to care in Boulder County. “Whether it be money, housing insecurity, food insecurity, education, language barriers, all of those things, we have to start at the root cause of that, and then that’s when we can actually expand, that’s when the care will actually be accessible and truly a right in our community.”
When asked about the current state of the fight for reproductive freedom in Colorado, Cobalt’s president, Karen Middleton, noted that the passage of Amendment 79 has put advocates in a strong position.
“This president has talked about throwing the issue back to the states, and our state has protected this right,” said Middleton in an interview following the event. “Especially with the government shutdown … are they really going to make this their next big priority? They could, but I’m not sure that they will try it. I still worry about what other states are doing.”
The exhibits’ next showing will be in Pueblo in February, with date and location to be announced. Cobalt is currently working on the implementation of Amendment 79 and preparing for the upcoming legislative session, as well as continuing to raise money for their abortion fund, which, according to Middleton, contributed two million dollars last year to women seeking abortion care.
