Gillian Frank

Contributor

Gillian Frank co-hosts Sexing History, a podcast that explores how the history of sexuality shapes our present. His book, Making Choice Sacred: Liberal Religion and Reproductive Politics Before Roe v Wade, is forthcoming from UNC Press. He tweets from @1gillianfrank1.

Reproductive Justice

Peering Into Windows and Wombs: Reflections on SB 8

By Gillian Frank • September 23, 2021

I thought about Dr. Curtis Boyd when I heard that the Supreme Court greenlit Texas’s unprecedented abortion restrictions. In the 1960s, Dr. Boyd lived in a small town in southern Texas. There, he provided illegal abortions to thousands of women who traveled across the United States to see him. Some of the women who found… Read more →

Reproductive Justice

The Miseries and Heartbreak of Backstreet Abortions: Before and After Roe

By Gillian Frank, and Ronit Y. Stahl • March 28, 2017

In 1967, a group of clergy in New York City founded the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS) to “bring light and hope to the thousands of people who suffer — usually in quiet, and sometimes in death — the miseries and heartbreak of backstreet abortions.” In an era of back-alley butchers, prohibitively high-priced abortions… Read more →

Protest: Past & Present

Faith, Reproductive Politics and Resistance: A Conversation with the Reverend Joan Bates Forsberg

By Gillian Frank • January 12, 2017

Reverend Joan Bates Forsberg played a notable role in struggles for contraceptive access in the 1950s and 1960s and abortion access in the 1970s. Although her name regularly appears in historical accounts of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court case that overturned Connecticut’s ban on contraceptives, historians have repeatedly described Forsberg as a minister’s… Read more →