It was only after my abortion that I really started to enjoy sex. Up to that point, fear of getting pregnant had so dominated my experience of sex that there wasn’t much mental space for what might feel good. I thought about my partner’s needs more than my own because that’s what I felt like I was supposed to do — I was a “whore” or a “slut” if I considered my own desires — even if I knew better. But after having an unintended pregnancy and not only making the decision to get an abortion but accessing it in a way that suited my needs, I felt newly in control of my own life, of my own body. It was then that I also learned how to track my cycle, which took a lot of the pressure off. Sexually, I felt like I had arrived.
And it wasn’t just me. Last year I cowrote a book called Liberating Abortion with Renee Bracey Sherman, founder of We Testify, an organization that supports people in telling their abortion stories. We interviewed over 50 people of color about their abortions. We found that many felt sexually free only afterward. Jack Qu’emi Gutiérrez, an abortion storyteller with We Testify, told us that after their medication abortion, which was a physically painful experience (as it often is), they immediately thought, “Oh I feel so good. Now I want to fuck.” By exercising their right to not be pregnant, they felt fully in control of their body and could seek its pleasure. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what it’s like to want sex.’”
For many of us, that period of claiming or rekindling our sexuality is sublime. But it doesn’t always last. After having children, I once again struggled to see myself as a sexual person. I was completely sick of being touched, and there wasn’t an easy solution. Over many months, our children moved out of the infant phase, and I started to find my desire again; not only had I chosen an abortion when I wanted one, I also chose to become a mother. My body was still my own — and mine to seek pleasure with.
In my long experience reporting on abortion and reproductive justice, the pleasures of bodily autonomy are at least as great as the guilt foisted on us by a puritanical society. Maybe if we understood the ways in which pleasure and reproductive justice intertwine, it would shift the terms of a debate that’s always been shaped by shame.
It should be clearer than ever right now that anti-abortion politics are part of a larger project of control — one that gives little thought to pleasure. Under the current president, we are seeing the administration decline to enforce protections aimed at keeping pregnant patients alive (like the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act, or EMTALA) or de-escalating violence outside of clinics (the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act). The government is also cutting funds for life-saving women’s health research and freezing grants to organizations providing reproductive health care services, like cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and contraception. These attacks reinforce a narrow vision of what our bodies are for: In the eyes of the growing pro-natalist movement, and many sympathetic government officials, that’s making babies. According to Elon Musk, “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble.” Meanwhile, the president and members of his cabinet have been accused of sexual assault.
The ways we think about gender, sex, and pregnancy in this country reflect the complicated histories of American capitalism, white Christian nationalism, and the racialized and gendered exploitation that has made pregnancy a fraught enterprise since chattel slavery. The ways we learn explicitly about sex reflect these histories. Early twentieth-century sex education programs designed by government and religious leaders preached that privileged white men could improve their status and class if they would just stop sleeping around and catching venereal diseases. They needed to remain abstinent and hygienic — pure, like white girls were already meant to be — to ensure their eventual wives would produce perfect babies to grow the white race.
There was certainly no sex education program for the vast numbers of Black and Indigenous people who had been oppressed since the nation’s founding and for whom sexual assault and medical neglect were key parts of the American experience. Or for the thousands of Black and Brown people who were experimented on in the early and mid-1900s to create treatments for sexually transmitted diseases or contraception methods that would benefit white people. When we spoke to one of the mothers of the reproductive justice movement, Luz Marina Rodriguez, for Liberating Abortion, she explained that she learned about the sterilization of Puerto Rican women while studying at New York University in the early 1980s. Luz was incensed by the “racist ideas about Puerto Rican women’s fecundity and education levels, overpopulation, and the desire to control who could procreate.”
Black feminists in the 1990s created the reproductive justice framework with all of this history in mind. They understood that in order for people of color to achieve reproductive justice — which they defined as the right to not have children, the right to have children, and the right to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities — they needed access to sexual and reproductive health care information and services. The states with the highest Black populations are still more likely to have little or no access to abortion, no access to comprehensive sex education, and no expanded Medicaid coverage. Republican-majority states have continued to push abstinence-only education and advance laws aimed at closing reproductive health care clinics. Denial of abortion services and sex education frequently go hand in hand.
The consequences of these information deserts cannot be overstated. Communities of color already held widespread distrust of medical interventions for sexual and reproductive health care due to decades of abuse. Negative sexual stereotypes also plague these groups, which have been painted as asexual or hypersexual. These tropes serve not only to misinform the public about our lives but also to block us from receiving information or learning about ourselves, our bodies, and what truly gives us pleasure.
In late February, I spoke to Kaitlyn Joshua, who shared her story of pregnancy loss at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the state of Louisiana, which had enacted an abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe, Joshua suffered through a prolonged miscarriage around 11 weeks into her pregnancy because her providers denied her access to miscarriage management, which would have been identical to an abortion. Joshua has since heard stories from other organizers in southern states about how these bans give providers cover to discriminate freely against Black women and other patients they don’t want to treat.
“In a lot of ways, I feel owned,” she told me:
Less free to be myself, and because I know I do not have autonomy over my own body — nor can I make certain decisions when thinking about family planning going forward — I feel less like myself, which certainly affects my mood and my desire to be intimate with my husband. These feelings are a direct result of my intrusive thoughts and anxiety due to the work that I do day in and day out to advocate for reproductive rights. It is weighing on my entire family. How can you feel sexy or even like yourself when you don’t feel like you have the right to do any of it?
Seeking out pleasure while being persecuted by the government isn’t easy. Today’s politics can make a person feel numb. But when we take back our power and control over sex, we taste freedom. I wrote with Renee in Liberating Abortion that it means releasing ourselves from “colonialism and white supremacy. We are reclaiming what was stolen from our ancestors and setting their legacies free.” And by doing so, we can make sure future generations feel this freedom as well.
Lawmakers want to keep people (especially Black people) poor and disempowered because this makes us easier to control — or so they believe. But history proves that our communities are anything but powerless. In the 1705 book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Maria Sibylla Merian explained how the Surinamese people used seeds of the peacock flower “to abort their children so that their children will not become slaves like they are.” She added that “black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly [by their Dutch masters], and because they believe they will be born again free and living in their own land.”
Through the years, our self-determination has not faltered. We saw this before the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling, through the Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Known colloquially as “Jane,” it ensured thousands of women could get their abortions while the procedure was still illegal, taught the women about their bodies, and encouraged them to be actively involved in the abortion process. As former Jane member Ruth Surgal said in a 1999 interview, “It was one of the things we talked about a lot, that we were not doing something to this woman, we were doing something with this woman and she was as much a part of it and part of the process as we were.” We also see this show up today in support networks like Las Libres that help people in states with abortion bans get pills by mail. Birth workers, healers, and activist medical professionals are adapting their strategies.
Pleasure is therefore ours for the taking as well. Trans advocate and educator Kayden Coleman talked to me over the phone in early March. “This particular social climate has encouraged me to center pleasure more because, goddammit, we need a dopamine hit somewhere,” he said. “You don’t get to take that away from me.” As a seahorse dad [a trans man who has been pregnant and given birth], he’s faced criticism of his sexuality online (Coleman has 94,000 Instagram followers and counting) and the assumption that he left sex behind upon becoming a parent. More than his white peers, he’s noticed that if he shows skin, “people are just so… ‘Oh my God, why don’t you have any clothes on?’ Because, because. Because I felt sexy this day, is that okay?” He added that “everybody wants to know how I have sex, who I have sex with, and why. But I can’t be sexual. But white trans people can be.” It is these trying moments that should encourage all of us to center pleasure more. After all, as Coleman states, “It’s my internal ‘fuck you’ to the powers that be that are trying to make my life miserable.”
I couldn’t agree more, but between parenting my children and trying to make the world a better place for them, there’s not much time to take care of myself, let alone to sit with my partner and luxuriate in our desires. It’s all so exhausting, and I know that I am not alone. “It feels as though all the walls are closing in at the same time,” Kaitlyn Joshua told me. “I can’t turn my mind off.” It’s especially hard to remember the freedom I felt after my abortion — the tantalizing feeling that my body was my own. But this autonomy, whether after an abortion or after choosing to parent, can be a source of pleasure and a source of power; it’s why lawmakers are so keen to take it away. The trick is to tune out the clatter and set your inhibitions free.
Regina Mahone is a senior editor at The Nation and coauthor, with We Testify Founder Renee Bracey Sherman, of Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.
Photo illustrations by Jordi Ng.
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