Florynce Kennedy’s Cultivation of Reproductive Expertise in Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz and Abortion Rap

ABSTRACT

This essay centers the legal and coalitional strategies of Black feminist Civil Rights attorney Florynce Kennedy in pre-Roe v. Wade abortion rights advocacy. Examining the depositional records of the 1969 case Abramowitz v. Lefkowitz and its subsequent distillation into the 1971 book Abortion Rap, we demonstrate how Kennedy’s rhetorical tactics enabled white women’s reproductive experiences to be intelligible—but centered—as expertise in the legal domain. Kennedy’s lines of questioning enabled feelings about unwanted pregnancies to become intelligible as expertise, challenging the authority of established experts. Kennedy impatiently leveraged her expert knowledge of the legal system to manage the state’s objections that threatened the well-being of witnesses and integrity of the case. While Abortion Rap appealed to the intersections of Black women’s reproductive concerns, it also hindered the possibility for coalitional trust to be built between legal experts and Black Power activists around abortion advocacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Abortion
• coalition
• emotion
• expertise
• legal rhetoric

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Stephanie Larson, Nisha Shanmugaraj, Amanda Brand, Cristy Dougherty, Sharon Yam, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Nadia Muhammad Rashid, and Atilla Hallsby for feedback and assistance in preparing this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz had several companion cases, including Hall v. Lefkowitz and John and Mary Doe v. Lefkowitz, which represented various other stakeholders. These various cases were eventually consolidated.

² This introduction toggles between discussing the contemporary impact of restrictive abortion laws on pregnant people, but we refer to “women” when discussing the historical specificities of the Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz case. We recognize that in the late 1960s and early 1970s abortion discourse in mainstream and radical groups was primarily focused on a unified category of woman, eliding experiences of trans people, gender nonbinary people, and women of color.

³ Our analysis cites depositions from the Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz Case File No. 4469 and Abortion Rap. If we were able to access the deposition in the case file, we analyzed the deposition as it appeared in the court records. Thus, unless Abortion Rap is cited, the representations of the depositions are from the case file. However, when citing both the court records and Abortion Rap, we relied on the pseudonyms used in Abortion Rap to protect the identities of those deposed.