Abortion and Demographic Fears in the Heartland

The changing racial composition of the United States has long animated white nationalists. Lina-Maria Murillo discusses how the history of abortion before Roe v. Wade and the battle for reproductive rights intersected with anxieties regarding "overpopulation" in the Midwest, and the debates among white supremacists regarding the future orientation of their movement.
This event was presented in collaboration with the Center for Research on Gender & Women, Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program, the Department of History, and Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS) at UW-Madison.
Lina-Maria Murillo is Assistant Professor in the departments of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, History, and Latina/o/x Studies at the University of Iowa. She is completing her first book titled Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands under contract with University of North Carolina Press. Several grants and fellowships, including from the American Association of University Women (AAUW), American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Ford Foundation, have supported her research. Murillo’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Rewire News, Nursing Clio and Notches. Her 2021 article, “Birth Control, Border Control: The Movement for Contraception in El Paso, Texas 1936-1940”, published in the Pacific Historical Review, is the winner of the Jensen-Miller prize for best article in the field of women and gender history from the Western History Association. With Professor Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Murillo also co-directs the Reproductive Justice and Maternal Politics Obermann collaborative at the University of Iowa.