The new restrictions on abortion were caused by many factors, including changing social, class, and family dynamics in the early 19th century. Americans in the Victorian era thought abortion was a problem brought on by upper-class white women, who were choosing to start their families later and limit their size. Increased female independence was also perceived as a threat to male power and patriarchy, especially as Victorian women increasingly volunteered outside the home for religious and charitable causes.
White men were also concerned by shifting ethnic and racial dynamics in the United States, worrying that the low birthrate of the white upper class would lead to racial inferiors and un-American immigrants overrunning the country. Together, a coalition of male doctors backed by the American Medical Association, the Catholic Church, and sensationalist newspapers began to campaign for the criminalization of abortion.
The Victorian anti-abortion movement portrayed women who terminated their pregnancies as unnatural and selfish, undermining the expected, patriotic, and godly role of the American woman—that of wife and mother. After abortion was made a criminal offense at the close of the Victorian era, it would not become legal again until , when the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling declared that all women had the right to terminate a pregnancy until the fetus was viable outside the womb.
The decision came after years of legal, political, and religious advocacy on behalf of women and their reproductive health and rights.
In the roughly years when abortion was illegal in the United States, women suffered and died from botched abortions, with as many as 5, women dying every year in the decades leading up to the ruling. After Roe v. Wade , deaths and hospitalizations resulting from unsafe abortions effectively ended in this country. When abortion was legal in early America, it was considered at least as safe as delivering a child at term, and today abortion is considered an extremely safe procedure.
The notion that contraception, like abortion, is a relatively new phenomenon is also wildly distorted. Then things changed—thanks in part to doctors determined to make abortions their realm. One of the reasons abortion was accepted at the time had to do with how Americans back then thought about the human body. Folk and medical wisdom held that the body was a place of equilibrium. Though Lohman had no formal medical training, she made a career selling patent medicines and helping pregnant women who wished to give birth without losing their reputations.
This infuriated those who felt that abortion was immoral—and created troubling competition for physicians. At the time, medicine was becoming an actual profession instead of the realm of homegrown practitioners, and the rise of medical schools and accreditation created a class of professional doctors. In a time before sonograms, this was often the only way to definitively prove that a pregnancy was underway. Quickening was both a medical and legal concept, and abortions were considered immoral or illegal only after quickening.
Churches discouraged the practice, but made a distinction between a woman who terminated her pregnancy pre- or post-quickening. An illustration on the front of the 19th century publication, Le Rire, of a woman praying to be spared of an unwanted pregnancy while her husband gets ready to come to bed.
She began her business in New York during the s, and, by the s, had expanded to include franchises in Boston and Philadelphia. She was first arrested in , but, it was her final arrest by Anthony Comstock which lead to her suicide on the day of her trial April 1, Although prototypes of the modern curette are referred to in ancient texts, the instrument which is used today was initially designed in France in , but was not applied specifically to a gynecological purpose until The 20th century saw improvements in abortion technology, increasing its safety, and reducing its side-effects.
Vacuum devices, first described in medical literature in the s, allowed for the development of suction-aspiration abortion. This resurgence is due to technological advances that permit early pregnancy detection as soon as a week after conception and a growing popular demand for safe, effective early abortion options, both surgical and medical.
An innovator in the development of early surgical abortion services is Jerry Edwards, a physician, who developed a protocol in which women are offered an abortion using a handheld vacuum syringe as soon as a positive pregnancy test is received. This protocol is also allows the early detection of an ectopic pregnancy.
Intact dilation and extraction was developed by Dr. James McMahon in It resembles a procedure used in the 19th century to save a woman's life in cases of obstructed labor, in which the fetal skull was first punctured with a perforator, then crushed and extracted with a forceps-like instrument, known as a cranioclast.
In , researchers at Roussel Uclaf in France developed mifepristone , a chemical compound which works as an abortifacient by blocking hormone action. It was first marketed in France under the trade name Mifegyne in Social discourses regarding abortion have historically been related to issues of family planning, religious and moral ideology, and human rights.
Abortion was a common practice. Evidence suggests that late-term abortions were performed in a number of cultures. In Greece, the Stoics believed the fetus to be plantlike in nature, and not an animal until the moment of birth, when it finally breathed air. They therefore found abortion morally acceptable. The plant, as the chief export of Cyrene, was driven to extinction, but it is suggested that it might have possessed the same abortive properties as some of its closest extant relatives in the Apiaceae family.
Silphium was so central to the Cyrenian economy that most of its coins were embossed with an image of the plant. In Rome, abortion was practiced "with little or no sense of shame. Aristotle wrote that, "[T]he line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive.
However, his beliefs on earlier-stage abortion were similar to Aristotle's, [51] though he could neither deny nor affirm whether such unformed fetuses would be resurrected as full people at the time of the second coming. The history of abortion law dates back to ancient times and has impacted men and women in a variety of ways in different times and places.
While laws regulating acceptable forms of abortion began with the Romans, widespread regulation restricting women's choice to have an abortion did not begin until the 13th century. There were no laws against abortion in the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, as Roman law did not regard a fetus as distinct from the mother's body, and abortion was not infrequently practiced to control family size, to maintain one's physical appearance, or because of adultery.
In AD, at the intersection of the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla, abortion was outlawed for a period of time as violating the rights of parents, punishable by temporary exile. Historically, it is unclear how often the ethics of abortion induced abortion was discussed, but widespread regulation did not begin until the 18th century. One factor in abortion restrictions was a socio-economic struggle between male physicians and female mid-wives.
In the later half of the 20th century most Western nations began to legalize abortion. Abortion is an issue of reproductive rights, a sub-set of human rights. This controversial subject has sparked heated debate and in some cases even violence against abortion providers.
According to English common law, abortion after fetal movement or " quickening " was punishable as homicide, and abortion was also punishable "if the foetus is already formed" but not yet quickened, according to Henry Bracton. Category : Female reproductive system.
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To use all functions of this page, please activate cookies in your browser. Login Register. Additional recommended knowledge. Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, page History of contraception. Gynecology and Obstetrics , vol. Induced abortion - a historical outline. Polski Tygodnik Lekarski, 29 45 , A typological study of abortion in primitive, ancient, and pre-industrial societies. Retrieved April 22, In Abortion in America: medical, psychiatric, legal, anthropological, and religious considerations.
Boston: Beacon Press. Techniques of abortion. In A study of abortion in primitive societies. Revised edition. 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. In the s and s, the estimated number of illegal abortions ranged from , to 1. Inspired by the civil rights and anti-war movements, the women's liberation movement gained steam in the s -- and reproductive rights took center stage.
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