It was, in the words of Felicia Kornbluh, a "cosmic joke" that struck her one fateful Saturday morning in January 2017. The night before, Kornbluh's mother, Beatrice Kornbluh Braun, had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that would claim her life two days later. As her family sat together in synagogue that morning, Kornbluh's older sister casually asked their father for the name of a political organization their mother had belonged to, the one that had legalized abortion in New York.

Kornbluh was thunderstruck. How had she, a professor of history and gender, sexuality and women's studies at the University of Vermont, never heard of her mother's involvement in the fight for reproductive rights?

"My dad used to say, 'You know, the law to decriminalize abortion in New York was written in our living room,' [but] we never knew what that meant," Kornbluh recalled in a recent interview. By the time she knew enough to inquire about it, it was too late.

From that moment of profound regret emerged Kornbluh's latest nonfiction book, A Woman's Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey From Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice. This compelling history, released in January on the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, traces two parallel, and sometimes opposing, political campaigns. The first was the successful effort to decriminalize abortion in New York before Roe. The second was the movement to end sterilization abuse, which disproportionately affected women of color, poor people and individuals with disabilities.

Two of the book's main characters are Kornbluh's mother, who wrote the first draft of New York's law decriminalizing abortion, and her across-the-hall neighbor, Helen Rodríguez-Trías, a Puerto Rican physician who cofounded the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse. Although the two women knew each other and had much in common — from their geographic proximity to their activism to their personal histories of trauma and abuse — Kornbluh discovered that the paths of their political action never crossed.

Given all that's been written about Roe, Kornbluh, who also serves as vice chair of the Planned Parenthood Vermont Action Fund, managed to break new ground in her third book. Also the author of histories of welfare rights and reform in the U.S., she's the first historian to examine the role that the state of New York played in the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark abortion case and the first to tell the story of Rodríguez-Trías, who died of lung cancer in 2001.

"She's almost invisible," Kornbluh said. "And yet her impact is vast and is everywhere, once you start looking."

Kornbluh spoke with Seven Days about her mother, Rodríguez-Trías, and the divide between the two different goals that they represented: reproductive rights and reproductive justice.

SEVEN DAYS: Why do you think your mother never mentioned her involvement in overturning New York's abortion ban?

FELICIA KORNBLUH: My mother was a creature of her generation, in that she really felt the strains between her identities as a professional woman and as a mother. I think my mother genuinely felt that she hadn't contributed that much or that she hadn't played an extraordinary role in this political campaign, which, as I see it, was absolutely critical to what happened in Roe v. Wade. If you believe in legal and accessible abortion, everyone knew that New York was the gold standard. Even though justice Harry Blackmun [who wrote the majority opinion in Roe] doesn't talk about the New York statutory change, it's all over the opinion once you look at it.

SD: Why do you suppose your mother and Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías never discussed their political activism?

FK: I think it was a race thing and a political perspective thing. Dr. Rodríguez-Trías was this extraordinary figure and a study of contrasts: On the one hand, she was very sophisticated and elegant but also really left-wing. She was always having people over at her house to raise money for the Sandinistas, or for organizations opposing U.S. intervention in Central America or advocating for Puerto Rico's independence. The circles she ran in were largely Puerto Rican and Latino. My parents were white liberal Jewish Democrats. If Helen had had a fundraiser for some group doing abortion work, my mother would have been all over it. But sterilization abuse and Puerto Rican independence were not part of her politics.

SD: What's the difference between reproductive rights and reproductive justice?

FK: Generally speaking, when we use the term "reproductive rights" these days, we're talking about access to abortion — securing it and maintaining it — and access to contraception. In that framework, the emphasis is on giving people ways to avoid getting pregnant or carrying a pregnancy to term. "Reproductive justice" implies all of that stuff, plus everything that people need to choose to have children. What reproductive justice advocates have done is grow that point so that people will have the economic ability to choose to have kids. They will have access to high-quality health care in their neighborhood, prenatal and postnatal care, childcare, and so on.

SD: You write that your mother never considered how sterilization abuse impinged on the rights of Black, Latina, Indigenous, queer, disabled and poor white women. Is it fair to judge her, and others in her movement, by the values of 2023 instead of those of the 1960s and '70s?

FK: My mother could only see the part of the movement that was urgently palpable and that mattered in her life and the lives of her friends. It's a matter of perspective. If we want a really robust movement, we have to have a lot of different people at the table, a movement built out of diverse people and perspectives.

At the time, Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women actually opposed rigorous sterilization guidelines. In New York, the anti-sterilization movement won three major victories: They won in the public hospital system in New York City, they won in New York City Council, and they won new federal guidelines in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. At each of those levels, there was major controversy. And at each level, the main people on the other side who were saying, "Don't change sterilization guidelines" were feminists and reproductive rights activists — basically, Planned Parenthood and NOW.

SD: Why did those groups oppose regulating sterilization?

FK: Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think they were worried about giving anyone control over any reproductive choice. There's actually an argument that the anti-abortion movement picked up tricks from the anti-sterilization movement, such as the 30-day waiting period for a sterilization procedure. The Planned Parenthood people were afraid of precisely that. If you put barriers in the way of one reproductive choice, it might create a precedent for putting barriers in the way of having an abortion. It was a practical decision, but one based on people's different life experiences.

SD: Is sterilization abuse still an issue in the U.S. today?

FK: It is. Last year I organized a group showing of a documentary about forced sterilization in the California correctional system. California now has a reparation program for people who were sterilized in the 1960s and '70s but also those sterilized in the 1990s and 2000s. There was also a scandal involving an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility during the Trump administration, in which women were given hysterectomies involuntarily or coerced into them.

There is considerable concern about what is going to happen now that Roe has been overturned and whether it's going to be a green light on sterilization, implicitly or explicitly. I was just reading the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision [which overturned Roe] and, in the dissenting opinion, the liberal justices say, if you're tearing apart the jurisprudence that Roe was based on, who's to say that we're not going to go back to the era of forced sterilization?

SD: Your book is critical of some early proponents of population control and their advocacy for sterilization. Is that still advocated?

FK: I'm not very active in the environmental movement, but if you pick up the hood in certain corners, you'll find a lot of talk about limiting population. And whenever there are public policies to carry that out, invariably what they're trying to do is limit the populations of Black, brown and poor people, whether in the United States or abroad. So I do worry about this very actively.

SD: What messages do you want people to take from this book?

FK: I want everyone who cares about reproductive rights — or reproductive liberty, as we call it in the Vermont Constitution — to think about people's right to have children and the families they want to have, in addition to their right to refrain from doing so. What are we willing to do to make that possible? It's a very, very big ask, and it's a huge agenda. But there are things we can do if we really care about that. We should care about the state's Reach Up program — what used to be called welfare — which is primarily financial aid for mothers and children. Vermont does better than most states, but it's still not a fully funded program that matches the cost of living.

We just won this overwhelming victory. Every town in Vermont voted for the Reproductive Liberty Amendment, which is now in our state constitution. That's amazing. But why don't we have the same enthusiasm and majority support for helping parents and kids financially? That is a way to ensure that people have genuine reproductive liberty.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.