Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Good to have you with us. Now last month, I had the pleasure of introducing an academic colleague during a professional conference. She's one of those bona fide scholarly stars. An award-winning teacher with a Pulitzer Prize? I couldn't wait to corner her for a lengthy conversation about research. Instead, she greeted me with an unexpected question. Can I show you a picture of my son?

My colleague's journey to motherhood wasn't swift or easy, but she's now the adoptive mother of a beautiful, I mean truly gorgeous baby boy. We sat hunched over, peering at her iPhone as she scrolled through hundreds of photos, her unreserved elation with motherhood leaving us both in laughter. This I suppose is the story we all want to tell about motherhood, about having mothers, about being mothers. Sharing her maternal joy in those moments, it felt like visiting a Hallmark card, the kind with music and confetti printed on scented paper.

There are many other stories of motherhood, about having mothers, about being mothers. Sometimes the story isn't bad, it's just complicated. The stories that make us reach for the Mother's Day card on the simply stated shelf. Some of the stories are brutal, inexplicable, violent, devastating, and at times there's just no story at all, just a wide gaping void, longing, unfulfilled, questions without answers. These are the stories that make us avert our gaze and hustle past the card aisle altogether.

On this Mother's Day weekend, some of you shared the ways this holiday is complicated for you.

Julie: This is Julie from Bellevue, Washington. My Mother's Day is complicated because my mother, who we cared for for five years, has Alzheimer's and is now in a care facility and does not remember much. My daughter no longer wants to live with us. The two people that I care about a lot at Mother's Day really probably won't be able to celebrate it with me.

Casey: This is Casey and I'm calling from Morristown, New Jersey. This Mother's Day has been very complicated for me because my relationship with both of my young adult daughters is very strained right now. Probably won't see them, don't know if they will even wish me Happy Mother's Day.

Stephanie: Hey, this is Stephanie from Minneapolis. Yes, Mother's Day is complicated. While my mother and I are very close, I have been, along with my husband, trying for the past, I don't know, four and a half, five years to become a mother of my own, and so seeing women my age as mothers is extremely emotional and draining and rage-inducing. All of the emotions, lots of jealousy, lots of sadness. It's a really bittersweet day.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Thank you so much for sharing your stories with us. Motherhood and its many meanings and expectations are created and experienced within the particular realities of our society and history. To better understand some of our shared national history with mothering, I sat down with Professor Michele Goodwin of the University of California-Irvine, who's author of the book, Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.

Professor Michele Goodwin: We should really concentrate in this country on thinking about what a Black mother would say the night before a slave auction, where she's either being sold away, or her child is being sold away. How do you instill in that child confidence that in this nation somewhere there is hope, that there is dignity? Even more, what message do you tell a child when the nation has said that your child has no human value, that your child is on the status of a mule, of a donkey, a cow, a piglet in the field, right?

When that is instantiated in law, when that's held up by the Supreme Court, what message does that Black mother have to send to say, "I see you. You are somebody. I love you. That no matter what it is that legislators will enact, no matter what a Supreme Court will uphold, you are somebody. You have worth. You have a worth that is beyond what this country recognizes."

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Goodwin's insights radically reframe the image of the American mother and call us to re-center our contemporary focus.

Professor Michele Goodwin: You're asking questions about, what does this mean in these times when Black mothers have to fear their children going out to play. Black mothers fearing their children raising money for the school and selling candy bars for fear that that child might be arrested in the process or police called on that child. The fear that Black mothers might have when they're driving with their children and have a fear of being randomly stopped on the road and not wanting to be shot in the process. That fear of Black mothers whose children have died because of police violence and other forms of violence.

It's holding all of these multiple threads all together at once, which Black women have had to do in this country.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: My own great-great grandmothers, they were among these women held in bondage, who knew the children they bore would never be fully theirs and yet they chose, out of an astonishing depth of humanity and hope, to love them and to build networks of love and community that extended far beyond the biological bonds of motherhood.

Professor Michele Goodwin: The love that Black mothers have had for children that they did not birth, the love that they've had for nieces that are not genetically related to them, the fight that they've given from every essence of their being to protect offspring that are not theirs, which is also a part of that history, with Black people being sold off, traded, bartered, mortgaged by banks, et cetera, moved around. This sense that there would be children that would find home and would be protected by people that they would encounter, enslaved Black folks, at the places that they came to, or even during Jim Crow and the massive migration.

Who wouldn't try to flee the conditions of places like Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and other places to try to make their way North, where they certainly were not experiencing a panacea, but let's be clear, the horrors of slavery only seeped into what became the tragedies of Jim Crow. All through that time, we see examples of Black women opening their arms.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Mothering amid the racial and gender violence of slavery forces brutal choices. In 1856, Margaret Garner, who escaped freedom with her children, was cornered by federal Marshals empowered by the Fugitive Slave law. Rather than be returned to slavery and separated from her children, Garner's maternal love led her to the woodshed with her children and a knife.

Professor Michele Goodwin: The history of Margaret Garner, Black women, [sighs] literally, we think about that story, it sends chills. As she walked across a frozen river without the aid of fancy boots, warm clothing to try to get to freedom. Then with the sounds of the bounty hunters and guns drawn, refused to surrender herself or her children back to a life of enslavement, and so in the case of Margaret Garner, began that process of trying to kill her children.

It says a lot about the trial that resulted, Melissa. Because at the trial, the question was whether Margaret would be considered human or not, and her children human or not. The case made national and international news because much hinged on this question. If Margaret Garner were a human being, then she could be charged with first-degree murder for attempting to kill her kids because she did not want those kids to grow up as she did, where she saw sexual violence, rapes, physical violence, coerced labor, all of that. If she were property, there would be no first-degree conviction of murder, and slavery would be able to continue just as it had. Because if Margaret Garner were considered a human being or her children considered human being, this would interrupt everything that this country knew about slavery.

Not a surprise that in that case, she was not considered a human being, her children were not considered human beings, and she was then returned to the person who by US law and practice owned her and her children.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: When Mother's Day begins on the auction block, or with Garner's bloody choice, then the fierce fight for reproductive rights, which we saw on full display this week in response to the leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court, takes on new meanings.

Professor Michele Goodwin: I think it's important to understand that reproductive freedom has been the euphemistic football played by a group of men who've been tossing it over the centuries. It's not just about right now, the gutting of Roe v. Wade. It is that if you look at this on a continuum, at any given time there are women and girls in this country, and especially Black and brown women, who are suffering myriad assaults that relate to reproductive freedom.

Historically, we understood this as being coercive and forced reproduction, but over time it's been forced and coercive sterilization, it's been coercive means of denying pregnancy terminations. There's a very interesting history that's there. The first attempts, actually, to criminalize abortion took place around the time of the Civil War. Not necessarily related to Black women, but at the time politicians and doctors said that they needed white women to spread their loins east, west, north, and south.

It's really important that we tie these threads together. The kind of anti-women's movement that's been embedded in US law and upheld by courts, kind of anti-people of color, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-Asian movements that have been baked into state and federal laws upheld by the United States Supreme Court. Then that helps us to place in context then these contemporary laws that seek to criminalize and punish abortion, but also other areas of criminalization.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: We spoke within the fraught context of the leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court obtained by Politico, which suggests the court is prepared to reverse Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to abortion. The landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision is rooted in the 14th Amendment, which established both equal protection and due process for all American citizens. Who is an American citizen according to the 14th Amendment? All persons born or naturalized in the United States. All persons born.

Professor Michele Goodwin: What I find interesting in this draft opinion is how the court then ignores exactly this very important principle that you're speaking to, which is that our United States Constitution does not recognize embryos and fetuses as persons. It doesn't. What you see in this draft opinion and what we see in the rhetoric coming from states is this kind of emboldened description of embryos as being persons with legal rights and fetuses as well.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Think of child support. Lawmakers and courts enforce support of children.

Professor Michele Goodwin: That is true. States go after people who have not paid child support for children that are alive and that exist. We don't do that with regard to embryos and fetuses.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Of course, there are examples when prosecutors have used the rhetoric of fetal rights as a strategic weapon to criminalize pregnant people. Like the case of Brittney Poolaw, an Indigenous woman in Oklahoma, who in 2021 was found guilty of manslaughter after experiencing a miscarriage.

Professor Michele Goodwin: We don't see this type of personhood recognition when there are Black and brown people living in toxic wastelands in the United States, where there are effects on both the pregnant person and then later on after birth, we see that the children have been affected. We don't see courts leaning in and providing protections to people who are living in slum-ridden areas where there are toxins such as lead paint and whatnot, and then there are outcomes in the born children. People can't file lawsuits in those areas.

You do see that in this very narrow context, legislators and judges willing to exercise some notion that's not consistent with the Constitution to suggest that there is a personhood in fetuses so long as it relates to conscribing what a woman can do.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: As we face this moment, what piece of hope can we take from our history as we face a continuing policing of the womb?

Professor Michele Goodwin: I'm inspired by the legacies of our foremothers. It's really quite remarkable the ways in which they paved a path, a kind of destiny for future offspring in times that seemed absolutely so dire. I think about this US Supreme Court, only years after the abolition of slavery, issuing an opinion saying that it's been far too long that Black people have been favored under the law. How do you deal with a system that can't even respect itself, that can't even hold its Constitution to mean something?

Black women, Black communities and families have given us that level of hope. I think that there is a lot to draw upon in terms of the successes and the victories that have been brought about. Let's be clear that we're talking about groups of people who fought hard not just for themselves, but for all Americans that our Constitution would be something more than mere words on paper but would actually have real meaning and real life. It's Black mothers that actually gave us that through the struggles and protests that were in Mississippi, that were in Alabama for voting rights, for civil rights. We can't even talk about Roe v. Wade and women's equality without thinking about the work that Black women did that led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.

There's lots of hope going forward that that same kind of love that you've talked about, same kind of energy and focus is still here with us. I think that that is why we see the backlash against voting rights, against women's rights because we've not been defeated.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: University of California-Irvine Professor Michele Goodwin, author of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.

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