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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood.

Today, Jenny Brown will recount the history of the struggle that led to the legalization

of abortion in the US almost 50 years ago.

And David De Young will talk about German business models who came to support Hitler's rise to power

and profited off a criminal war.

First abortion, Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the US

didn't come out of nowhere. There was a long struggle to get there, a struggle we can learn from today

if we want to see abortion fully legal in the US again.

Jenny Brown is the author of two books in the topic, both of which came out in 2019,

without apology from Verso and birth strike from PM Press.

She's also an organizer with National Women's Liberation. Jenny Brown.

Journalists aren't necessarily big on history, so we don't really get much of a background

to where Roe came from. It just seems like it was handed out from on high.

But certainly there was a lot of struggle that went into that decision, the preceding of that decision.

Give us an outline of what the struggle for abortion rights was like in the decade or two before Roe.

There was obviously a lot of illegal abortion going on, but there was a group of mostly professionals, lawyers, doctors, some writers, and some ordinary women

who spent a lot of time in the 50s and 60s trying to reform the laws.

So this took the form of changing state laws, which had no exceptions to abortion,

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