When Abortion Was a Crime: A Fascinating Review of America's Centuries of Experience With Abortion
February 6, 2012
In researching the history of abortion in this country and how we got into such a strange situation where otherwise compassionate people got it into their heads that cutting off breast cancer screening funds to Planned Parenthood would be a great way to show their opposition to abortion (never mind that the funds in question had nothing to do with abortion), I stumbled on this outstanding 1997 review from the Atlantic on a book, When Abortion Was a Crime by Leslie J. Reagan of the University of California.
I had no idea how widespread (but often fatal) abortion concoctions were in colonial America, and how accepted it was to terminate a pregnancy prior to the period of "quickening", an idea that would be upheld much later in Roe v. Wade.
I was trained by some obstetricians who had been around in the days before Roe v. Wade, and they swore they never wanted to see the horrors of women bleeding to death from a botched back-alley abortion, something that the legalization of abortion virtually eliminated. The author points out that such direct, visceral experience is harder to come by now, and many counties have no abortion providers at all.
In contrast, in countries such as Uganda, where abortion is illegal, abortions are the #1 cause of maternal mortality. When New York legalized abortion in 1970, maternal mortality was cut in half; when South Africa legalized abortion more recently, it plunged 90%. Even the most rabid anti-abortion activists do not believe the punishment for terminating a pregnancy should be death - and if they do, then they really have no right to call themselves "pro-life."
Interestingly, the American Medical Association, which was an important advocate of legalizing abortion in the 1970s opposed it a century earlier, as did early feminists (the former on business grounds and concerns about the lethality of potions being prescribed by quacks, the latter because they felt that a woman (who at that time had to have sex whenever demanded by her husband, who could not be charged with rape against his wife) should instead have the then radical freedom to "just say no" as Nancy Reagan might have put it.
Protestants opposed abortion on racial and religious grounds:
"Would the 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 answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.'"
Wow. Abortion was not opposed because of compassion for potential life but fears by WASPs that they might be out-bred by disproportionately fertile Catholic immigrants. Those who vilify Planned Parenthood take particular delight in pointing out that Margaret Sanger, like so many prominent people of her time, had a soft spot for eugenics, but it's clear that those who opposed abortion also had racial and demographic "fitness" in mind.
The difference was in means, not ends. Abortion foes feared that unless white, well-to-do, Protestant women had as many children as the new arrivals from Southern Europe, something terrible would happen to the racial mix of the country. Sanger at some level agreed, except her solution was not to get into a reproductive arms race but to help bring down the much higher reproductive rate in the desperately poor tenement population her first-ever birth control clinic served. Otherwise, the mothers she saw and their children would be guaranteed a life of grinding poverty.
After seeing her mother die young, apparently exhausted by spending virtually all of her adult life pregnant or recovering from pregnancy, Sanger did not want the same fate imposed upon the next generation, and thanks to her courageous work (she was almost arrested for violating the Comstock law which prohibited DISCUSSING contraception as obscene), most of us are far more likely to live in households with 2 to 3 children rather than 9 to 12, and women are far less likely to die either in labor or from a botched abortion. Abortion is safe, legal, and relatively rare (it was perhaps 7 times as great in the 19th century). We need to make sure it stays that way.
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