Abstract

In June 2022, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reclassifying abortion as a “state-tostate issueµ, put at risk the right for millions of American women to access a wide range of health prerogatives, and the most affected clearly appear to be poor, lowincome, mostly black and brown women, as they cannot afford the costs of traveling in search of centers willing to perform abortions or other paid health services. This article identifies an oppositional fault line between right-wing reactionary politics in the US and Black Feminist Theory (BFT) and practices, arguing that the real divide over pro-life vs pro-choice did not take place in the partition between Republicans and Democrats. In the tenets of BFT, by contrast, abortion is the name of a demand for reproductive justice and care, which aims to materially transform society. However, in challenging traditional conceptions of black motherhood and the role of women within the black family, BFT allows its practitioners to disrupt one of the foundations of the right-wing reactionary politics, namely the family. This research reconstructs the legislative process that produced the reversal of the Supreme Court decision that from 1973 to 2022 tied the issue of women’s choice to the constitutional amendment guaranteeing citizens’ privacy, paying specific attention to the unstable foundation of this women’s right, and focusing on the potential trigger effects of states’ individual anti-abortion legislation, for example in limiting contraception. Then, through reconsidering some of the cornerstones of BFT, the article suggests the need to expand the defense of the universal and human right to abortion through parallel strategies, such as advocating for reproductive justice and care and demanding the abolition of the family institution