Amanda (Amanda Prestigiacomo)
speaker
1,029 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Amanda (Amanda Prestigiacomo)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
You have to hold power over those who are capable of administering it.
You have to make it official before you can officially take it away.
Centuries of community knowledge and wisdom had to be eradicated so that authority could be institutionally controlled.
Abortion has never been about abortion.
So it was that the first laws against abortion before quickening did not take effect in the United States until the revolution of modern medicine began in the 1860s.
Prior to that medical movement, American colonies, following English common law, protected the right to abortion before quickening.
Quickening referred to the time when a woman felt a fetus kick, generally between 16 to 20 weeks into pregnancy.
The understanding being that life began at quickening and abortions prior to that point were therefore not the law's business.
But even after the medical fight to criminalize abortion, the tradition of women's right to early abortion was already too deeply rooted in U.S.
society.
Abortionists continued to practice openly and with public support and juries refused to convict them.
So for almost a century after abortion was officially illegal, abortion remained, if politically complicated, certainly not partisan.
There were strong opponents, especially within the Catholic Church, but the issue was not a Democratic-Republican dividing line.
Republican and Democratic officials had roughly the same voting records on abortion.
And outside the Catholic faith, it wasn't a religious issue.
Evangelicals were not only not mobilized around anti-abortion, they were largely unmoved by it.
In the late 1960s, there was a growing feminist grassroots movement claiming that women could not be full citizens without the control over their own reproduction.
And this movement, together with the National Organization for Women, lobbied effectively to convince 17 states to pass more liberal abortion laws prior even to Roe v. Wade, which significantly Republican governors were also instrumental in passing.
In 1967, as governor of California, Ronald Reagan, the self-same Ronald Reagan who would a mere 13 years later become the presidential candidate of the emerging religious right condemning abortion at all costs, that Ronald Reagan signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country.
The Therapeutic Abortion Act.
Showing 181–200 of 1,029 · page 10 of 52
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