Ericka Ayodele Dixon is a Disability Project Senior National Organizer at the Transgender Law Center.

June 2026 marks the fourth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. For some, this landmark ruling marked an end to abortion access as they knew it. 

But for disabled, Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, low-income, and trans and queer communities, it was but one more chapter in a long history of the state controlling our bodies, reproduction, and very lives.  

It’s no secret that reproductive rights, including access to abortion care, fertility treatments, and birth control, are being systematically dismantled in this country. However, what is less commonly discussed is how marginalized disabled people (BIPOC, queer, trans, immigrant, poor) often find themselves both hypervisible in reproductive rights debates and ignored as a community in movement leadership, policy, and organizing.  

Marginalized disabled people—and our leadership—must be at the center of the fight for abortion access. Since this country’s inception, our bodies and lives have borne the brunt when the government determines who is worthy of life and dignity.  

Long history of eugenics

The roots of state control of reproduction can be traced to the U.S.’ history of enslavement. From this country’s earliest years, enslavers specifically and brutally bred enslaved people to create a larger labor force. They also employed forced sterilization, mainly by castrating enslaved men, as a means of fear and control. 

Forced sterilization was a tool for the state to control who could and could not reproduce, based on oppressive ideas of what made for a perfect society and perfect humans. Of course, the accepted  image of a “perfect” human often meant a cisgender heterosexual, white, Christian, wealthy, and educated man.  

Eugenic tropes were even legitimized through the U.S. legal system. 

In Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court ruled that Carrie Buck, the white daughter of a mother deemed feebleminded by the state, who became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter after being sexually assaulted, could be legally forcibly sterilized because of her perceived (but not actual) disability. 

Those trying to get sterilization on the books carefully crafted a narrative that Buck’s daughter was living with an intellectual disability when she was not. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. gave his opinion on the case, saying “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” 

While Indiana passed the nation’s first sterilization law in 1907, Virginia’s Eugenical........

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