When was abortion began

While there are significant regional differences in abortion policies and political discourse, abortion is rarely a point of contention during elections. Abortion practices, debates, and laws initially developed quite similarly in Europe and the U. While Europeans continued to believe that abortion was a desperate act of unfortunate women, some powerful Americans began to argue that abortion was an immoral act of sinful women.

These divergent perceptions of abortion and the women who have them still affect abortion debates and legislation on both sides of the Atlantic. Historically, abortion policy has revolved around three main players: government officials, women, and medical practitioners.

The historical record also shows that, for thousands of years, women have limited the number of the children they bore through pregnancy prevention, abortion, and infanticide. Abortion was only recently outlawed, and then only for a period of roughly years. When women did not have legal access to abortion services they still found ways albeit often unsafe ways to end unwanted pregnancies.

For most of Western history, aborting an early pregnancy was considered a private matter controlled by women and was not a crime. At the turn of the nineteenth century most people in Western Europe and the United States did not believe human life was present until a pregnant woman felt the first fetal movements, a phenomenon referred to as quickening.

Before quickening, women thought about pregnancy in terms of a lack of something menstruation rather than the presence of something a fetus. In an effort to restore their monthly periods, they took herbal abortifacients such as savin, pennyroyal, and ergot, which they often found in their own gardens.

They did not consider such practices abortion. In fact, the word abortion was confined to miscarriages that occurred after quickening. Medical doctors had trouble even verifying a pregnancy until the woman reported that quickening had occurred.

Religious authorities such as the Roman Catholic Church also supported the idea that the soul was not present until a later stage of pregnancy. Although not official church doctrine, this belief was based on St. Augustine's fifth-century interpretation of Aristotle, that the soul enters the body only after the body is fully formed—some 40 days after conception for males and 80 days for females.

Laws reflected this distinction between the quick and the nonquick fetus. In the United States and England, abortion was legal in the early s as long as it was performed prior to quickening. During later stages of pregnancy, abortion was a crime, but distinct from other forms of murder and punished less harshly.

It was very difficult to prove that a woman accused of abortion had ever felt the fetus move. Even in infanticide cases, the court often had to rely on the accused woman's testimony to know whether the child had died in utero or had been born full-term and alive. When Margaret Rauch was put on trial in Pennsylvania in for a suspected infanticide, she testified that the baby "used to move before, but did not move after [she fell during the pregnancy].

At this time, the pregnant woman had significant power in defining pregnancy and the law was based on her bodily experience. By the mids women from all walks of life aborted pregnancies, and abortion services had grown more widely available. As the professionalization and commercialization of medicine began, more abortion options became available to the women who could afford to pay for them.

Poor women—especially unmarried ones—continued to use herbs to abort unwanted pregnancies, and could purchase abortifacients from pharmacists through the mail. If those drugs failed they could go to the growing number of practices that used medical instruments to induce abortions.

In the late nineteenth century, American and European doctors, social reformers, clergy members, and politicians made abortion into a social, political, and religious issue. Women's experiences of quickening were discredited as unscientific and medical doctors became the recognized experts on pregnancy and fetal development.

Quickening lost credibility as a valid indication of fetal life when doctors lobbied state governments to change laws to reflect their new way of thinking. By , Western European countries and the United States had outlawed abortion during all stages of pregnancy.

The U. British criminalization began with Lord Ellenborough's act of and was fully realized when Parliament passed the Offenses Against the Person Act in Abortion was outlawed state-by-state in the U. Abortion was also considered a criminal act in most of Western Europe, with many of the laws originating in the Napoleonic legal code.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, social scientists began to publish statistics comparing birth rates among nations. As nationalism and imperialism intensified tensions between European countries, these numbers took on new significance. Statesmen feared that if women chose to have fewer children then this would decrease their nation's ability to compete in modernized warfare. Anxiety racked French politicians when they learned France's birth rate had fallen nearly a third between and , while its neighbor and recent and future enemy Germany's had barely changed at all.

The idea that women needed to give birth to as many children as possible spread contagiously. Ludwig Quessel captured the dire essence of this worry when he said: "A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of a birth-strike. Concerns arose in Europe and the U. The visible use of abortion by white, middle-class women seemed to threaten the status of their male counterparts and "white" positions of power. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in , women of "good stock" who refused to have children were "race criminals.

Increased scrutiny of pregnancy and childbirth coincided with a push by medical doctors to increase their professional influence. Because of the variety of abortion methods available to women, trained physicians had little control over this area of what they considered medical science.

In the United States, the newly created American Medical Association AMA initiated an antiabortion campaign in as part of its efforts to professionalize and to restrict competition from homeopaths and midwives. They lobbied for the criminalization of abortion, capitalizing on fears that not enough white, native-born women were having children.

Doctors claimed there was little difference between a quick and a nonquick fetus and that earlier and later stages of pregnancy were not distinct. In doing so, they redefined the meaning of abortion to include early stages of pregnancy.

AMA doctors discredited women's experiences of quickening as unscientific and emotional. Noted AMA physician and antiabortion advocate Dr. Horatio Storer quipped in his book Why Not? American doctors joined forces with religious authorities to pass antiabortion laws.

While doctors spearheaded the movement to discredit quickening and criminalize abortion, their ideas about fetal development also led to important changes in Roman Catholic Church doctrine.

Pope Pius IX declared in that an embryo was a human being with a soul from the time of conception. This declaration challenged existing beliefs that an ensouled, animated fetus was different from an inanimate one. Pius also stated that abortions performed at any stage of pregnancy warranted excommunication. In , a papal decree condemned therapeutic life-saving abortions as well. These changes inspired many Catholics to support the AMA's antiabortion campaign.

Protestant churches, with their doctrinal emphasis on individual reason and responsibility, remained more open to abortion and more accepting of therapeutic abortion. American and most European abortion laws included an exemption allowing doctors to perform abortions if a woman's life was in danger. These exemptions further solidified the alliance between the state and doctors, however, by allowing doctors to adjudicate the legality of abortions. Parental involvement laws, requiring that minors seeking abortions either notify their parents or receive parental consent, affect millions of young women.

As of early , 35 states have these laws; 23 states enforce them. In some states, a physician is required to notify at least one parent either in person, by phone, or in writing. Health care providers face loss of license and sometimes criminal penalties for failure to comply. Antiabortion forces have also used illegal and increasingly violent tactics, including harassment, terrorism, violence, and murder. Since the early s, clinics and providers have been targets of violence.

Doctors and other workers have been the object of death threats, and clinics have been subject to chemical attacks for example, butyric acid , arson, bomb threats, invasions, and blockades.

In the late s, a group called Operation Rescue initiated a strategy of civil disobedience by blockading clinic entrances and getting arrested. There were thousands of arrests nationwide as clinics increasingly became political battlefields.

Over clinics have been bombed. After , the violence became deadly. The murder of two doctors and an escort at a clinic in Pensacola, Florida, was followed by the murder of two women receptionists at clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts.

A health care provider spoke about the impact of the violence: The fear of violence has become part of the lives of every abortion provider in the country. As doctors, we are being warned not to open big envelopes with no return addresses in case a mail bomb is enclosed. I know colleagues who have had their homes picketed and their children threatened.

Some wear bullet-proof vests and have remote starters for their cars. Even going to work and facing the disapproving looks from co-workers--isolation and marginalization from colleagues is part of it.

The antiabortion movement continues to mount new campaigns on many fronts. Most recently, it has aggressively put out the idea that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. In January , the results of a Danish study, the largest to date involving one and a half million women , showed that there is no connection. Despite the lack of medical evidence and the fact that the scientific community does not recognize any link, the antiabortion movement continues to stir up fears about abortion and breast cancer.

Legal but Out of Reach for Many Women We have learned that legalization is not enough to ensure that abortions will be available to all women who want and need them. In addition to a lack of facilities and trained providers, burdensome legal restrictions, including parental consent or notification laws for minors and mandatory waiting periods, create significant obstacles.

A minor who has been refused consent by a parent may have to go through an intimidating and time-consuming judicial hearing. Mandatory waiting periods may require a woman to miss extra days of work because she must go to the clinic not once, but twice, to obtain an abortion.

If travel is required, this can make the whole procedure unaffordable. In other words, for millions of women, youth, race, and economic circumstances together with the lack of accessible services--especially for later abortions--translate into daunting barriers, forcing some women to resort to unsafe and illegal abortions and self-abortions. Since then, there have been other severe blows. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services , the Court opened the door to new state restrictions on abortion.

In Hodgson v. Minnesota , the Court upheld one of the strictest parental notification laws in the country. These trends were further codified in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a decision upholding a highly restrictive Pennsylvania law that included mandatory waiting periods and mandatory biased counseling.

Two frightening themes emerged in the Casey decision. Second, the Court showed little concern for the severe impact of state restrictions on women with few financial resources. In the aftermath of Casey, many states have passed similar restrictions, which have the effect of limiting access to abortion, especially for women with low incomes, teenage women, and women of color.

These infringements on abortion access have curtailed the abortion rights of millions of women. In the face of the unrelenting efforts of the antiabortion movement, those of us who believe that women should make their own reproductive decisions will have to become involved in the ongoing struggle to preserve and expand abortion rights.

Some view legal abortion and contraception as tools of population control. Advocates of population control blame overpopulation for a range of problems, from global poverty to ethnic conflict and environmental degradation. Historically, this type of thinking has led to a range of coercive fertility control policies that target Third World women. For example, HIV-positive women in the U.

The crusade proved to be a form of backlash against the shifting aspirations of women. It was "antifeminist at its core," Reagan wrote. The AMA pushed for state laws to restrict abortions, and most did by Then the Comstock Law, passed by Congress in , banned items including abortion drugs. But before abortions were banned, a woman known as Madame Restell ran abortion businesses from New York to Philadelphia and Boston.

Her main clientele, Reagan wrote, were "married, white, native-born Protestant women of upper and middle classes. Abortions, birth control and general efforts to manage the timing of pregnancy meant birth rates among white women were falling just as immigrants streamed into the United States.

And the idea of being out-populated by "others" worried some anti-abortion activists like Storer. He argued that whites should be populating the country, including the West and the South.

This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation," Storer said, according to Reagan's research. During the Depression and beyond. Even after abortions became illegal, women continued to have them; they just weren't advertised the same way. Practitioners did their work behind closed doors or in private homes. Or women without means resorted to desperate -- and often dangerous or deadly -- measures.

At times, abortion rates increased in the face of the law. The Depression was a perfect example. Specialists passed out business cards and opened up clinics, Reagan explained, and nobody bothered them. In that era, abortion wasn't seen as a women's issue, it was an economic issue. The famous-violinist scenario, the invention of the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, has probably inspired as much commentary as any philosophical metaphor since Plato's cave.

Abortion as philosophical puzzle and moral conundrum is all very well, but what about abortion as a real-life social practice? Since the abortion debate is, theoretically at least, aimed at shaping social policy, isn't it important to look at abortion empirically and historically? Opponents often argue as if the widespread use of abortion were a modern innovation, the consequence of some aspect of contemporary life of which they disapprove feminism, promiscuity, consumerism, Godlessness, permissiveness, individualism , and as if making it illegal would make it go away.

What if none of this is true? Reagan demonstrates that abortion has been a common procedure—"part of life"—in America since the eighteenth century, both during the slightly more than half of our history as a nation when it has been legal and during the slightly less than half when it was not. Important and original, vigorously written even down to the footnotes, When Abortion Was a Crime manages with apparent ease to combine serious scholarship it won a President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association and broad appeal to the general reader.

But Reagan, who is an assistant professor of history, medicine, and women's studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is the first to span the whole period of criminalization and to cover the subject in such depth. Moving skillfully between a nationwide perspective and a detailed study of Chicago, Reagan draws on a wide variety of primary documents, many never before examined.

Using patient records, transcripts of trials and inquests into abortion-related deaths, medical-society proceedings, and reports in the popular press, she reconstructs the complex, shifting network of arrangements and understandings that enabled illegal abortion to persist, and sometimes even to flourish, for more than a hundred years. In doing so she not only brilliantly illuminates a hitherto shadowy aspect of American life but also raises crucial questions about the relationship between official mores and the values by which people—including the promulgators of those official mores—make the decisions that shape their lives.

Until the last third of the nineteenth century, when it was criminalized state by state across the land, abortion was legal before "quickening" approximately the fourth month of pregnancy. Colonial home medical guides gave recipes for "bringing on the menses" with herbs that could be grown in one's garden or easily found in the woods. By the mid eighteenth century commercial preparations were so widely available that they had inspired their own euphemism "taking the trade". Unfortunately, these drugs were often fatal.

The first statutes regulating abortion, passed in the s and s, were actually poison-control laws: the sale of commercial abortifacients was banned, but abortion per se was not. The laws made little difference. By the s the abortion business—including the sale of illegal drugs, which were widely advertised in the popular press—was booming.

The most famous practitioner, Madame Restell, openly provided abortion services for thirty-five years, with offices in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia and traveling salespeople touting her "Female Monthly Pills.

In one of the many curious twists that mark the history of abortion, the campaign to criminalize it was waged by the same professional group that, a century later, would play an important role in legalization: physicians. The American Medical Association's crusade against abortion was partly a professional move, to establish the supremacy of "regular" physicians over midwives and homeopaths.

More broadly, anti-abortion sentiment was connected to nativism, anti-Catholicism, and, as it is today, anti-feminism. Immigration, especially by Catholics and nonwhites, was increasing, while birth rates among white native-born Protestants were declining. Unlike the typical abortion patient of today, that of the nineteenth century was a middle- or upper-class white married woman.