Renee Bracey Sherman

Renee Bracey Sherman is an award-winning reproductive justice activist, abortion storyteller, and writer. She is the founder and executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions and share their stories at the intersection of race, class, and gender identity. Bracey Sherman’s expertise centers on the lived experiences of people who’ve had abortions and spans the representation of characters who’ve had abortions on television and film, and in pop culture. She is an executive producer of Ours to Tell, an award-winning documentary elevating the voices of people who’ve had abortions, and has served as an advisor to documentarians, showrunners, and television and film writers. Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone are co-authors of their forthcoming book LIBERATING ABORTION: Our Legacy, Stories, and Vision for How We Save Us from Amistad/HarperCollins and co-hosts of the podcast The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion from The Meteor.

Hailed as the ‘Beyoncé of Abortion Storytelling,' for over a decade, Bracey Sherman has been recognized as one of the most vital voices in elevating the conversation about abortion experiences, and using creative and innovative strategies to shift the conversation centering Black people, people of color, and other marginalized identities. She popularized the phrase “everyone loves someone who had an abortion,” coined ‘abortionsplaining,’ and created the #AskAboutAbortion campaign which led to presidential candidates being asked questions about their plans to increase abortion access. In 2022, Bracey Sherman made history by becoming the first person to testify before Congress and describe how someone can self-manage an abortion with pills. She has trained hundreds of abortion storytellers in the United States and around the world, including elected officials and celebrities. The storytellers have been featured in articles, interviews, books, media, comics, events, and legislative testimonies.

In 2014, she published the results and recommendations from these interviews in two 20-page guides, Saying Abortion Aloud, which are used and referenced across the reproductive health, rights, and justice field. In 2015, Bracey Sherman partnered with media critic and author Anita Sarkeesian and anti-rape activist and author Jaclyn Friedman to co-author Speak Up & Stay Safe(r), a multilingual digital guide on handling online harassment.

Bracey Sherman has written articles featured in the The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, EBONY Magazine, The Nation, and Cosmopolitan, among others. She is a go-to voice for commentary on race, gender, and health care. Her analyses of pop culture representations of abortion have been featured in The Washington Post, Bitch, Al Jazeera, and more.

For four years, Bracey Sherman served as the Senior Public Affairs Manager at the National Network of Abortion Funds she created We Testify. Previously, Bracey Sherman worked at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, and Gay-Straight Alliance Network. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and sociology from Northeastern Illinois University and a master’s degree in public administration from Cornell University, where she served as the communications chair of Women in Public Policy and the digital editor of the Cornell Policy Review.

Follow her on Twitter at @RBraceySherman.