The rights to control one’s body, establish a family, and have children necessarily safeguard the right to abortion as a fundamental right. The right of “having a family, a wife, children, home,” as Senator Jacob Howard, who played a central role in drafting the Fourteenth Amendment, put it, guarantees to the individual free choice in matters of family and childbirth, in the same way that the freedom of speech also includes the right to not speak. The right to bear and raise children and the right to abortion are two sides of the same coin—both integral parts of reproductive freedom. In our constitutional heritage, laws that prohibit abortion and those that compel abortion are equally offensive to bodily integrity, autonomy, and equal dignity…

Protecting people’s reproductive liberty was very much a part of that effort to define what it means to not be enslaved—to be free. One of slavery’s cruelest aspects was the brutal denial of reproductive autonomy in matters of family life. Plantation owners forced enslaved women to bear children who would be born into bondage. Rape and other forms of coerced procreation enabled the growth of the institution of slavery, even after the international slave trade was outlawed in 1808. “Slavery is terrible for men,” wrote Harriet Jacobs in the 1861 narrative of her enslavement, “but it is far more terrible for women.” Jacobs’s autobiography, as the intellectual Henry Louis Gates has observed, demonstrated how enslaved women were treated as “object[s] to be raped, bred, or abused.” Not only were enslaved people coerced into bearing children; enslaved people in loving relationships had no right to marry or raise children of their own. A spouse or a child could be sold on a whim, and untold numbers were. Family separations were endemic to slavery: About half of the enslaved people sold on the interstate market were forced to leave behind a spouse or a parent.