Abortions in 1800 Through 1900 Peer Reviewed Articles

Of all the bug roiling the ongoing civilization wars, abortion is both the most intimate and the most common. Well-nigh half of American women take terminated at least one pregnancy, and millions more than Americans of both sexes accept helped them, as partners, parents, health-care workers, counselors, friends. Collectively, it would seem, Americans have quite a bit of knowledge and experience of abortion. Yet the debate over legal abortion is curiously abstruse: we might be discussing brain transplants. My files are crammed with articles assessing the question of when human life begins, the personhood of the fetus and its putative moral and legal status, and acceptable versus deplorable motives for terminating a pregnancy and the philosophical groundings of each 1—not to mention the interests of the state, the medical profession, assorted religions, the taxpayer, the infertile, the fetal father, and fifty-fifty the fetal grandparent. Farfetched analogies abound: abortion is like the Holocaust, or slavery; denial of ballgame is like forcing a person to spend ix months intravenously hooked up to a medically endangered stranger who happens to be a famous violinist. Information technology sometimes seems that the further ballgame is removed from the bodily lives and circumstances of real girls and women, the more interesting it becomes to talk most. 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.

The Granger Drove, New York

Abortion equally philosophical puzzle and moral conundrum is all very well, but what about abortion as a real-life social practice? Since the abortion fence is, theoretically at least, aimed at shaping social policy, isn't information technology important to wait at abortion empirically and historically? Opponents oftentimes argue as if the widespread use of abortion were a mod innovation, the outcome of some attribute of contemporary life of which they disapprove (feminism, promiscuity, consumerism, Godlessness, permissiveness, individualism), and as if making it illegal would go far go away. What if none of this is true? In When Abortion Was a Crime, Leslie J. Reagan demonstrates that abortion has been a common process—"part of life"—in America since the eighteenth century, both during the slightly more than half of our history as a nation when information technology 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 Law-breaking manages with apparent ease to combine serious scholarship (it won a President's Volume Award from the Social Scientific discipline History Clan) and broad appeal to the full general reader.

Some of the story of illegal abortion has been told by other historians: Linda Gordon, Rickie Solinger, James C. Mohr. Simply Reagan, who is an assistant professor of history, medicine, and women'due south studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is the starting time to span the whole menstruum of criminalization and to encompass the bailiwick in such depth. Moving skillfully between a nationwide perspective and a detailed written report of Chicago, Reagan draws on a wide variety of primary documents, many never before examined. Using patient records, transcripts of trials and inquests into ballgame-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 a hundred years. In doing and then she non but brilliantly illuminates a hitherto shadowy aspect of American life but besides raises crucial questions almost the human relationship between official mores and the values by which people—including the promulgators of those official mores—make the decisions that shape their lives.

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Until the final third of the nineteenth century, when information technology was criminalized country by state across the land, ballgame was legal before "quickening" (approximately the fourth month of pregnancy). Colonial habitation medical guides gave recipes for "bringing on the menstruation" with herbs that could exist grown in one'southward garden or easily found in the woods. Past the mid eighteenth century commercial preparations were so widely available that they had inspired their ain euphemism ("taking the trade"). Unfortunately, these drugs were often fatal. The first statutes regulating abortion, passed in the 1820s and 1830s, were actually poison-control laws: the sale of commercial abortifacients was banned, just ballgame per se was not. The laws made piddling departure. Past the 1840s the abortion business—including the sale of illegal drugs, which were widely advertised in the pop press—was booming. The most famous practitioner, Madame Restell, openly provided abortion services for thirty-5 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 marker the history of abortion, the campaign to criminalize it was waged by the same professional grouping that, a century later, would play an important role in legalization: physicians. The American Medical Association'due south 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, every bit it is today, anti-feminism. Immigration, especially by Catholics and nonwhites, was increasing, while birth rates amid white native-born Protestants were declining. (Unlike the typical abortion patient of today, that of the nineteenth century was a middle- or upper-course white wife.) Would the Due west "be filled by our own children or by those of aliens?" the physician and anti-abortion leader Horatio R. Storer asked in 1868. "This is a question our women must respond; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation." (It should exist mentioned that the nineteenth-century women'due south move also opposed ballgame, having pinned its hopes on "voluntary motherhood"—the right of wives to control the frequency and timing of sex with their husbands.)

Still, having accomplished their legal goal, many doctors—including prominent members of the AMA—went correct on providing abortions. Some late-nineteenth-century observers estimated that two million were performed annually (which would hateful that in Victorian America the number of abortions per capita was 7 or eight times as high as it is today). Reagan argues persuasively that our image of nineteenth-century medicine is too monolithically hierarchical: while medical journals inveighed confronting abortion (and contraception), women were oftentimes able to make doctors listen to their needs and even lower their fees. And because, in the era before the widespread use of hospitals, women chose the doctors who would nourish their whole families through many lucrative illnesses, medical men had self-interest as well as compassion for a motive. Thus in an 1888 exposé undercover reporters for the Chicago Times obtained an ballgame referral from no less a personage than the head of the Chicago Medical Society. (He claimed he was conducting his ain investigation.) Unless a woman died, doctors were rarely arrested and even more rarely convicted. Even midwives—whom doctors connected to try to drive out of business organisation past portraying them, unfairly, equally dangerous ballgame quacks—practiced largely unmolested.

What was the point, then, of making abortion a law-breaking? Reagan argues that its main outcome was to expose and humiliate women defenseless in raids on abortion clinics or brought to the infirmary with abortion complications, and thereby send a message to all women about the possible consequences of flouting official gender norms. Publicity—the forced disclosure of sexual secrets before the regime—was itself the punishment. Reagan'due south discussion of "dying declarations" makes specially spooky reading: because the words of the dying are legally admissible in courtroom, women on their deathbeds were informed past law or doctors of their imminent demise and harassed until they admitted to their abortions and named the people connected with them—including, if the adult female was unwed, the homo responsible for the pregnancy, who could be arrested and fifty-fifty sent to prison. In 1902 the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association endorsed the by then mutual policy of denying a adult female suffering from ballgame complications medical care until she "confessed"—a practise that, Reagan shows, kept women from seeking timely treatment, sometimes with fatal results. In the belatedly 1920s some 15,000 women a year died from abortions.

This situation—widespread availability punctuated by constabulary-enforcement crackdowns, popular-printing scandals, and fitful attempts at medical self-policing—persisted for decades. Unsurprisingly, the Low, during which women stood to lose their jobs if they married or had a kid, saw a big surge in the abortion rate. Reagan describes clinics complete with doctors, nurses, receptionists, and printed instructions detailing follow-up care, and "nascency-control clubs," whose members would pay regularly into a collective fund and draw abortion fees from it as needed. It was just in the 1940s and 1950s that organized medicine and the law combined to force these long-standing operations out of business concern and to disrupt the networks of communication by which women had found their way to them. Our popular image of illegal abortion equally difficult to discover, extremely dangerous, sordid, and expensive dates from this period, as practise the notorious "abortion wards" filled with women suffering from botched operations and attempts at self-abortion (always the most dangerous method). Well-continued white women with private health insurance were sometimes able to obtain "therapeutic" abortions, a never-divers category that remained legal throughout the epoch of illegal abortion. But these were rare, and almost never bachelor to nonwhite or poor women. Even for the privileged, though, admission to prophylactic abortion narrowed throughout the fifties, as doctors, fearful of being prosecuted in a repressive political climate for interpreting "therapeutic ballgame" too broadly, prepare upwards infirmary committees to dominion on abortion requests. Some committees were more compassionate than others: at Mount Sinai, in New York, suicide attempts were considered an appropriate indication; at other hospitals they were ignored. In one instance of particular callousness, when a teenager tried to kill herself afterwards her request was turned down, the committee decided to hospitalize her for the rest of her pregnancy. (She somewhen got her abortion, after her multiple suicide attempts proved too disruptive for the staff.)

The conventional wisdom today considers Roe v. Wade to exist an avant-garde decision, "judicial activism" at either its enlightened best or its loftier-handed worst. Reagan places the conclusion in its historical context, showing that information technology was a logical response to the times. Past the sixties the whole jerry-congenital structure of criminalization was crumbling, along with the credo of gender and sexuality that lay behind it. Moderate reforms had already been tried: twelve states permitted abortion in instances of rape, incest, danger to physical or mental health, or fetal defect, but since nearly women, as always, sought abortions for economic, social, or personal reasons, illegal abortion continued to thrive (something to consider for those who advocate in one case over again restricting legal abortion in this way). When New York Country decriminalized ballgame in 1970 and thousands of well-off women started traveling there to obtain safe abortions while their disadvantaged sisters continued to adventure death at abode, the inherent unfairness of a legal patchwork was thrown into bold relief (something to ponder for those who want to throw the consequence "back to the states"). Far from foisting a radical departure on an unready nation, the Supreme Court was responding to a decade-long buildup of popular sentiment for alter. The movement was spearheaded by doctors who saw firsthand the carnage created by illegal abortion (more than than 5,000 deaths a year, mostly of black and Hispanic women), and whose hands were now firmly tied by the infirmary committees they themselves had created. They were joined past civil-liberties lawyers, who brought to their briefs a keen understanding of criminalization'southward discriminatory furnishings; and by grassroots activists in the reborn women's movement, who by the end of the 1960s were resisting the law, forming such groups as the Society for Humane Abortion, in California, which denounced restrictions every bit insulting and humiliating to women, and Jane, in Chicago, which began as an ballgame-referral service and ended by grooming its members to perform abortions themselves.

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Legalizing abortion was a public-health triumph that for pregnant women ranked with the advent of antisepsis and antibiotics. In 1971, the yr subsequently decriminalization, the maternal-mortality rate in New York State dropped 45 percent. Today, however, the inequality of access that helped to bring illegality to an end is in one case once more on the increment. More than than fourscore percent of U.S. counties have no abortion providers, and some whole states have only 1 or two. The Supreme Courtroom has allowed states to erect barriers to ballgame—denial of public funds for poor women's abortions, parental consent and notification requirements, mandatory delays, "counseling sessions." Anti-ballgame zealots have committed arson, set on, and murder in their campaign against abortion clinics. A new generation of doctors, who take never seen a woman die from a septic abortion or been haunted by the suicide of a patient denied help, are increasingly reluctant to terminate pregnancies. Only 12 percentage of medical schools teach kickoff-trimester abortion every bit a routine attribute of gynecology. If Reagan is right to correlate anti-abortion activity with periods of high feet near feminism and radicalism generally, none of this should come as a surprise. She closes on an ominous note, sketching the possibility of a United States in which not merely is abortion one time again a offense just anti-ballgame fanaticism brings on a Romania-style fetal-police state, complete with authorities-monitored pregnancies and police investigations of miscarriages.

I came away from the volume more sanguine. One of Reagan'due south noteworthy findings, after all, is that the views of the American people nearly abortion have remained rather stable over 2 centuries. Attitudes toward early abortions—in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries those before quickening, today those in the outset trimester—have always been much more permissive and matter-of-fact than attitudes toward later abortions, simply equally losing a pregnancy later on one or two missed periods, however sad to a woman who wants to bear a child, has always been seen as a smaller event than miscarrying at half-dozen months. Lilliputian in the American popular tradition resonates with the "pro-life" doctrine that condemns all abortions alike on the grounds that a fertilized egg is already a baby. Far from being a weird judicial batter, as its opponents fence, Roe v. Wade'due south trimester arrangement, which gradually extends the right of states to regulate and even ban most abortions equally the fetus develops, reflects this folk understanding rather well. Similarly, the general lack of enthusiasm for prosecuting those who perform abortions and the near total failure to prosecute and jail women for having them suggest that whatever Americans may consider abortion to exist, information technology isn't baby killing, a criminal offence our courts have ever punished quite severely.

When Abortion Was a Crime is rich, thought-provoking, and revelatory on many levels, not least as a triumphant vindication of the somewhat contested disciplines of women'southward history and social history "from the bottom up." Perhaps its greatest accomplishment, though, is in a way its simplest: it puts abortion dorsum into the context in which it really occurs—the lives of obscure and ordinary women. If the abortion fence were really about ballgame, Reagan's work would export many of its terms to the chip heap: it seems absurd to suggest that the overburdened mothers, drastic immature girls, and precariously employed working women who populate these pages risked public humiliation, injury, and death for mere "convenience," much less out of "secular humanism" or a Lockean notion of property rights in their bodies. It's fifty-fifty more preposterous—not to mention insulting—to run into them as standing in relation to their fetuses equally a slaveowner to a slave or a Nazi to a Jew.

Reagan suggests that the ballgame debate is really an ideological struggle over the position of women. How free should they be to accept sexual experiences, in or out of marriage, without paying the price of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood? How much right should they take to consult their own needs, interests, and well-being with respect to childbearing or anything else? How subordinate should they be to men, how deeply embedded in the family, how firmly controlled by national or racial objectives? If she is right, and I call up she is, a work of history is non going to make much of a dent in the certainties of those who would like to see ballgame once again fabricated a crime. The people who need this book the most won't read it. Everyone else, though, will notice it enlightening.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/abortion-in-american-history/376851/

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