Abortion History/Abortion Future

I doubt anyone reading this will take much interest in what I write in this post. I write this to make a record. I hope it will be read, that it will inform, but none of it relieves me of the obligation to say what is on my mind.

Long ago I looked at the notes for abortion in West's Indiana Digest. All the cases seemed to have a dead woman.

Reading Policing Abortion validates my memory:

Scholar Leslie J. Reagan explores how Chicago authorities enforced these criminal codes over the next seven decades. “The state prosecuted chiefly abortionists, most often after a woman had died, and prosecutors relied for evidence on dying declarations collected from women near death due to their illegal abortions,” Reagan notes.

 And maybe a taste of what is to come:

Most of the women who had abortions were married, but the state concentrated its enforcement on “unwed women and their partners.” That is, male partners could be arrested and jailed for getting women pregnant in the first place and/or assisting in an abortion—it was common for these men to be held in jail before coroner’s inquests.

This is the country to which we want to return? Really?

Read the full article, please.

sch 7/14/22

An update:

With a Supreme Court claiming justification by history reading The Guardian's ‘Thank the lord, I have been relieved’: the truth about the history of abortion in America is a necessary antidote to Justice Alito's perverse imitation of a historian.

In the 1700s and early 1800s, conception was considered a disturbance of a woman’s natural balance. Methods of “removing a blockage” or “restoring the menses” were sometimes necessary to reestablish the body’s balance, even if they induced a miscarriage. Abortions that occurred before quickening, which was understood as the time when a pregnant woman could feel the foetus move (usually around the fourth month), were legally and morally acceptable....

Criminalization came as a means of consolidating power, economic and political, not morality:

Punishment for terminating a pregnancy at any stage would come only decades later. In 1857, the recently established American Medical Association (AMA) initiated a campaign, led by Dr Horatio R Storer, to end abortion. The organisation’s reasons were many, but women’s health was not chief among them. Reagan writes that the AMA and its members were attempting to “win professional power, control medical practice, and restrict their competitors, particularly homeopaths and midwives”.

***

Class, racial and gender anxieties were factored into the doctors’ fear of losing power. As immigrants poured into the US, the birthrate for white, Protestant, middle-class married women plummeted to historic lows that couldn’t be attributed to miscarriage, celibacy or barrenness. Improved contraception was part of the reason, but so was an increase in the abortion rate. Storer and his peers became preoccupied with the latter – and for reasons that had less to do with protecting the right to life than with maintaining the prevailing social hierarchy. As Reagan writes, “Anti-abortion activists pointed out that immigrant families, many of them Catholic, were larger and would soon outpopulate native-born white Yankees and threaten their political power.”

 Sch 7/16/22

Updated 7/23 from The Guardian's Body politics: the secret history of the US anti-abortion movement:

But there is yet another, less well-known cause for all this in civil-war era America. Although most people today assume that anti-abortion laws were motivated by moral or religious beliefs about a foetus’s right to life, that is far from the whole story. In fact, the first wave of anti-abortion laws were entangled in arguments about nativism, eugenics and white supremacism, as they dovetailed with a cultural panic that swept the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as a result of the vast changes in American society wrought by the conflict. This panic was referred to at the time in shorthand as “race suicide”.

So much for morality.