History of Abortion

[caltrek]

Abortion Has Been Common in the U.S. since the 18th Century – and Debate Over It Started Soon After
May 5, 2022

https://theconversation.com/abortion-ha ... ter-182496

Extract:

(The Conversation) Although various forms of birth control predate the birth control pill, the FDA’s approval of Enovid-10 (commonly known as “The Pill”) was a watershed in the national debate around family planning and reproductive choice.
…
From unregulated to criminalized

From the nation’s founding through the early 1800s, pre-quickening abortions – that is, abortions before a pregnant person feels fetal movement – were fairly common and even advertised.
…
In the mid- to late-1800s, an increasing number of states passed anti-abortion laws sparked by both moral and safety concerns. Primarily motivated by fears about high risks for injury or death, medical practitioners in particular led the charge for anti-abortion laws during this era.

By 1860, the American Medical Association sought to end legal abortion. The Comstock Law of 1873 criminalized attaining, producing or publishing information about contraception, sexually transmitted infections and diseases, and how to procure an abortion.

Expanding legal abortion

In 1967, Colorado became the first state to legalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, or if the pregnancy would cause permanent physical disability to the birth parent.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade occurred in 1973.

Edit: A more complete timeline is available at this site: https://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-abor ... story.html

[weatheriscool]

Well, the greeks use to leave their children out in the wild to be ate by wild animals and Aztecs use to cut their hearts out for the gods to bless them with good times.

[caltrek]

^^^Thank you for your comment.

Edit: Original first sentence of this post deleted.

[caltrek]

The Long Hand of Slave Breeding, Redux
by Joann WypiJewski
May 6, 2022

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/06 ... ing-redux/

Introduction:

(Counterpoint) I hate liberalism’s language of choice. I always have. Redolent of the marketplace, it reduces the most intimate aspects of existence, of women’s physical autonomy, to individualistic purchasing preferences. A sex life or a Subaru? A child or a cheeseburger? Life, death or liposuction? In that circumstance, capitalism’s only question is, Who pays and who profits? The state’s only question is, Who regulates and how much? If there is a sliver of benefit to the right’s ongoing and grotesque multi-front assault on women, it is the clarion it sounds to humanists to take the high ground and ditch the anodyne talk of “a woman’s right to choose” for the weightier, fundamental assertion of “a woman’s right to be.”

That requires that we look anew to history and the Constitution, which, Justice Alito is quite correct, does not include the word ‘abortion’ (or ‘space travel’ or ‘automobile’ or even ‘woman’) but does include ‘slavery’.

When I first wrote that opening paragraph, in 2012, my friend and sister Pamela Bridgewater, who’d been their impetus, was alive. She was starting cancer treatments, which ultimately failed. At that moment, though, she was intending to revise her legal writings on reproductive liberty and the legacies of slave breeding into a book that would speak a common language to women, particularly the class of women whom she’d escorted to safety while doing clinic defense in Florida, Wisconsin, DC. She was a legal scholar, a professor, an activist, a sex radical, a diva. Pamela was fire.

She was also very sick. I mostly use her familiar name here because the circumstances of first writing were intimate. Dying is intimate, even if, like being born, it is also social. I had been staying at Pamela’s house, a big, welcoming place in DC that she and her husband, Kweku Toure, filled with friends, food, fast talk and quiet when that was required. One afternoon we were two women sitting around talking the way friends do—a little gossip, a little news, a little bit about the Thirteenth Amendment. Pamela had been talking about the Thirteenth as long as I’d known her. She was fascinated by the complex history and legal interpretations secreted behind its plain language:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

caltrek's comment: This raises an interesting point: Is not forcing a woman to the full term of her pregnancy a form of "involuntary servitude" and thus should be prohibited under the Thirteenth Amendment?

Now a "textualist" should agree. Even though abortion is not explicitly mentioned in this passage, clearly the answer should be yes.

An "originalist" might disagree: surely that was not the "original" intent behind the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. The drafters of that amendment simply did not have abortion in mind.

One problem is the inconsistency of "textualists." That is to say that they are philosophically textualists - except when they are not...

[caltrek]

Inside the 1970s Abortion Underground
by Dylon Jones
May 6, 2022

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... o-00030433

Introduction:

(Politico) In 1965, Heather Booth was a student at the University of Chicago when a friend reached out to her for help: His sister needed an abortion.

Booth had never given abortion much thought — “I didn’t understand that even three people talking about providing an abortion was a felony,” she says today — but she wanted to help, so she found a physician who was willing to perform the illegal procedure, T.R.M. Howard, a major figure in the civil rights movement. Then she got another request. And another.

The calls kept coming, and Booth recruited more women to help, creating a system known by the anonymous name “Jane.” Called “The Service” by some members, Jane grew into an underground network of women who organized clandestine, illegal abortions in their homes and apartments — a safer alternative than those provided by the mob. Eventually, the women of Jane learned to perform the procedure themselves

Conclusion:

Kaplan: Well, you know, what Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn, organize.” So I’m sure this is happening. I don’t know. And wouldn’t tell you if I did know of what is going on.

But I know that women are not going to let other women suffer and die for a theocracy that is not of their making, and that doesn’t speak to any of their needs, concerns or issues — that doesn’t respect women and the sometimes very difficult decisions that women have to make.

Re: Joe Hill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_mourn,_organize!

[caltrek]

What Alito Gets Wrong About the History of Abortion in America
by Leslie Reagan
June 2, 2022

Introduction:

(Politico) If it were possible to eavesdrop on conversations among women and some doctors in early America, you might overhear the phrase “bringing on the menses.” If a woman didn’t menstruate when expected, she was considered to be sick and action was required to bring her back to health. Women who had “a common cold” — a euphemism for “obstructed” menses — used a variety of methods, teas and concoctions to bring “their menses back.”

In other words, returning menstruation to its normal cycle was within the purview of a woman’s own self-health care and was not regulated by the state until after “quickening” — the moment during a pregnancy when a woman could feel a fetus kick and recognized a life “stirring” within her. Quickening occurred between the fourth and sixth month of pregnancy. Only after quickening was an induced miscarriage, an abortion, considered immoral and banned by law.

The truth is that abortion is deeply rooted in our nation’s history — in practice, in morality and in law. Abortion was not always a crime — although Justice Samuel Alito speciously claims otherwise in his recently disclosed draft majority opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
“An unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973,” Alito asserts in the draft opinion.

The logic that Alito uses in the draft opinion leans heavily on history — history that he gets egregiously wrong. Alito explicitly dismisses the distinction between ending a pregnancy before or after quickening, a distinction that my research has found was critical to the way American women and American physicians traditionally thought about pregnancy. In early America as in early modern England, abortion before “quickening” was legal under common law and widely accepted in practice.

Read more here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine ... -00036174

[caltrek]

Conservative Supreme Court Justices Disagree About How to Read the Law
by Jed Barnes
June 8, 2022


Extract:

(The Conversation) Alito’s reasoning in the Dobbs draft is similar to his explanation in the Bostock ruling in three ways that highlight his approach to legal interpretation.

First, he begins with the language of the governing law. Alito finds no specific reference to abortion in the U.S. Constitution, and no implicit right to abortion in any other constitutional provision, including the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, which says the government shall not deprive a person “of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

Second, Alito argues that when the governing law is silent (or ambiguous) on issues, judges should let the elected branches decide them. In the Dobbs draft, he calls the finding of implied rights in Roe an “abuse of judicial authority.”

Third, Alito argues that history holds the key to reading the law. He says that any argument that abortion is implicitly included in the 14th Amendment’s due process clause fails because in 1868, the year the amendment was ratified, 28 of the 37 states criminalized abortion at all stages of pregnancy. And, he notes, eight of the remaining nine states passed laws doing so before 1910.

Alito further claims that the ruling would not mean the end of other constitutionally protected rights, like interracial marriage and same-sex marriage, because abortion is “unique” in that it destroys an “unborn human being.” But this statement is what lawyers call “dicta” – comments that are incidental to the resolution of the case. In fact, Alito’s legal methodology is not limited to abortion rights or even constitutional law, as seen from its use in the Bostock ruling.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/conservati ... aw-183590

[caltrek]

Roe Overturned: What you Need to Know About the Supreme Court Abortion Decision
by Linda C. McClain
June 24, 2022

Extract:

(The Conversation) Republican appointees Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter upheld Roe. They revised its framework to allow more state regulation throughout pregnancy and weakened the test for evaluating those laws. Under Roe’s “strict scrutiny” test, any restriction on the right to privacy to access an abortion had to be “narrowly tailored” to further a “compelling” state interest. But Casey’s “undue burden” test gave states wider latitude to regulate abortion.
…
Even before (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – handed down on June 24, 2022, the ability to access abortion was limited by a patchwork of laws across the United States. Republican states have more restrictive laws than Democratic ones, with people living in the Midwest and South subject to the strongest limits.
…
The court’s narrow approach to the concept of constitutional liberty is at odds with the broader position it took in the earlier Casey ruling, as well as in a landmark marriage equality case, 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges. But the majority said in its ruling that the decision would have no impact on the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Alito’s opinion also rejected the legal principle of “stare decisis,” or adhering to precedent. Supporters of the right to abortion argue that the Casey and Roe rulings should have been left in place as, in the words of the Casey ruling, reproductive rights allow women to “participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.”

The ruling does not mean that abortion is banned throughout the U.S. Rather, arguments about the legality of abortion will now play out in state legislatures, where, Alito noted, women “are not without electoral or political power.”

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/roe-overtu ... on-184692

caltrek’s comment: Alito noted, women “are not without electoral or political power” – even as they move forward with efforts to allow greater and greater voter suppression measures. Women would be wise to exercise what electoral power they have left to mitigate the impact of the court’s recent decision. History should serve as a good guide in that effort.

[caltrek]

Privacy Isn’t in the Constitution – but It’s Everywhere in Constitutional Law
by Scott Skinner-Thompson
June 24, 2022

Introduction:

(The Conversation) Almost all American adults – including parents, medical patients and people who are sexually active – regularly exercise their right to privacy, even if they don’t know it.

Privacy is not specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. But for half a century, the Supreme Court has recognized it as an outgrowth of protections for individual liberty. As I have studied in my research on constitutional privacy rights, this implied right to privacy is the source of many of the nation’s most cherished, contentious and commonly used rights – including the right to have an abortion – until the court’s June 24, 2022, ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson.

A key component of liberty

The Supreme Court first formally identified what is called “decisional privacy” – the right to independently control the most personal aspects of our lives and our bodies – in 1965, saying it was implied from other explicit constitutional rights.

For instance, the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly allow people to privately decide what they’ll say, and with whom they’ll associate. The Fourth Amendment limits government intrusion into people’s private property, documents and belongings.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/privacy-is ... aw-183204

caltrek's comment: “Privacy is not specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. But for half a century, the Supreme Court has recognized it as an outgrowth of protections for individual liberty.” I think this subtle analysis became part of the problem. Liberals spoke in shorthand about the “right of privacy.” It was not “privacy” as a right that was being defended. It was liberty itself. Forcing a woman to come to full term, especially in cases of rape or incest, is a form of involuntary servitude. Even where rape and incest are not involved, there is a question of implied agreements during the act of conception. If men are not willing to step forward to assume their parental responsibility, then women should have the freedom of control over their own bodies and not be forced into involuntary servitude. For me, that is a much stronger argument than confusing allusions to a “right to privacy.”

[Time_Traveller]

Roe Overturned: What you Need to Know About the Supreme Court Abortion Decision
by Linda C. McClain
June 24, 2022

Extract:

(The Conversation) Republican appointees Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter upheld Roe. They revised its framework to allow more state regulation throughout pregnancy and weakened the test for evaluating those laws. Under Roe’s “strict scrutiny” test, any restriction on the right to privacy to access an abortion had to be “narrowly tailored” to further a “compelling” state interest. But Casey’s “undue burden” test gave states wider latitude to regulate abortion.
…
Even before (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – handed down on June 24, 2022, the ability to access abortion was limited by a patchwork of laws across the United States. Republican states have more restrictive laws than Democratic ones, with people living in the Midwest and South subject to the strongest limits.
…
The court’s narrow approach to the concept of constitutional liberty is at odds with the broader position it took in the earlier Casey ruling, as well as in a landmark marriage equality case, 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges. But the majority said in its ruling that the decision would have no impact on the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Alito’s opinion also rejected the legal principle of “stare decisis,” or adhering to precedent. Supporters of the right to abortion argue that the Casey and Roe rulings should have been left in place as, in the words of the Casey ruling, reproductive rights allow women to “participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.”

The ruling does not mean that abortion is banned throughout the U.S. Rather, arguments about the legality of abortion will now play out in state legislatures, where, Alito noted, women “are not without electoral or political power.”

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/roe-overtu ... on-184692

caltrek’s comment: Alito noted, women “are not without electoral or political power” – even as they move forward with efforts to allow greater and greater voter suppression measures. Women would be wise to exercise what electoral power they have left to mitigate the impact of the court’s recent decision. History should serve as a good guide in that effort.

This also tells you that women in the US can't make their own decision without the republicans having a say about their reproductive system.

[caltrek]

Abortion: The Story of Suffering and Death Behind Ireland’s Ban and Subsequent Legalization
by Gretchen E. Ely
May 16, 2022

Introduction:

(The Conversation) Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion in the U.S., the nation may find itself on a path similar to that trodden by the Irish people from 1983 to 2018.

Abortion was first prohibited in Ireland through what was called the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861. That law became part of Irish law when Ireland gained independence from the U.K. in 1922. In the early 1980s, some anti-abortion Catholic activists noticed the liberalization of abortion laws in other Western democracies and worried the same might happen in Ireland.

Various Catholic organizations, including the Irish Catholic Doctors’ Guild, St. Joseph’s Young Priests Society and the St. Thomas More Society, combined to form the Pro Life Amendment Campaign. They began promoting the idea of making Ireland a model anti-abortion nation by enshrining an abortion ban not only in law but in the nation’s constitution.

As a result of that effort, a constitutional referendum passed in 1983, ending a bitter campaign where only 54% of eligible voters cast a ballot. Ireland’s eighth constitutional amendment “acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and [gave] due regard to the equal right to life of the mother.”

Further extract:

What happened over the 35 years after the referendum passed in Ireland was a battle to legalize abortion. It included several court cases, proposed constitutional amendments and intense advocacy, ending in 2018 with another referendum, re-amending the Irish constitution to legalize abortion up to 12 weeks gestation.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/abortion-t ... on-182812

[caltrek]

Many Anti-abortion Activists Before Roe Were Liberals Who Were Inspired by 20th-Century Catholic Social Teaching
by Daniel K. Williams
July, 2022

Extract:

(The Conversation) Both before and immediately after the Roe v. Wade decision, many prominent Republicans, such as first lady Betty Ford and New York Gov. and later Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported abortion rights. At the same time, some liberal Democrats spoke out against abortion rights, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, vice presidential candidate Sargent Shriver and his wife Eunice Kennedy Shriver, as well as civil rights activist Jesse Jackson.

The anti-abortion movement was strongest in the heavily Catholic, reliably Democratic states of the Northeast, and its supporters believed that their campaign for the rights of the unborn accorded well with the liberal principles of the Democratic Party.

When I researched the early history of the anti-abortion movement for my book “Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade,” one surprising finding was that the pre-Roe anti-abortion movement was filled with liberal Democrats who had supported the federal anti-poverty initiatives associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and President Lyndon Johnson’s social programs in the 1960s. They wanted to couple abortion restrictions with additional efforts to fight poverty and expand government-funded health care.

Catholic and Democrat

Most of the pre-Roe anti-abortion activists in the United States were inspired by 20th-century Catholic social teaching that connected the right to life for the unborn with a larger ethic of concern for the less fortunate. Like the majority of Catholic voters at the time, many were Democrats, and they hoped that a party that championed the poor would likewise be interested in protecting fetal life.

Many of them, in keeping with the teachings of their church, held conservative views on issues of sex and reproduction. They also, in keeping with Catholic social teaching, believed that the state had a responsibility to care for the poorest of its citizens and therefore supported liberal Democratic economic initiatives.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/many-anti- ... ng-185936

[caltrek]

When Abortion Was Illegal, Adoption Was a Cruel Industry.
by Pema Levy
July 5, 2022

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) A few weeks ago, before the final decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which ended the constitutional right to an abortion, I downloaded the audio version of American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption by the journalist Gabrielle Glaser. Glaser’s book details the history of what became known as the “Baby Scoop Era,” the period from 1945 to 1973 during which as many as three to four million young, unmarried women surrendered their newborns to an exploitative adoption industry, and for many against their will, were permanently severed from their child.

As a new mother myself, I could not help but picture my own son as I listened to the story of Margaret Erle. Seventeen years old, and forced to give her son Stephen up for adoption in the early 1960s, she spends decades mourning his loss. Meanwhile, her son, renamed David, spends his life wondering why his mother let him go. I found myself tearing up as I strolled home from daycare drop-offs and filled with anxiety as I lay in bed at night. When I told my husband what I was reading, he advised me to stop. Glaser’s history was not only tragic because of the toll on lives like Margaret’s and David’s, but also because the only reason the sanctioned cruelty of the adoption industry ended was because of the now-defunct 1973 Supreme Court ruling, Roe v. Wade.

Further extract:

During the Baby Scoop Era, the toxic mix of a lack of sex education, birth control, and a post-war boom in premarital sex, led to a baby boom and increasing numbers of unmarried pregnant women. Many of these women and teenagers were sent to maternity homes where they would have their babies in secret, then place them up for adoption and return to their lives as if nothing had happened. At least, Glaser notes, this was the case for white women whose families wanted respectable middle-class lives for them—and for profitable adoption agencies who wanted white babies to place with white adoptive parents.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... ose-days/

[caltrek]

There is No One Islamic Interpretation on Ethics of Abortion, But the Belief In God’s Mercy and Compassion Is a Crucial Part of Any Consideration
by Zahra Ayubi
July 8, 2022

Introduction:

(The Conversation) As a scholar of Islamic ethics, I’m often asked, “What does Islam say about abortion?” – a question that has become even more salient since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed 50 years of constitutional protection for the right to get an abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling on June 24, 2022.

This question really needs to be reframed, because it implies a singular view. Islam isn’t monolithic, and there is no single Islamic attitude about abortion. The answer to the question depends on what kinds of Islamic sources, scriptural, legal or ethical, are applied to this contemporary issue by people of varying levels of authority, expertise or religious observance.

Muslims have had a long-standing, rich relationship with science, and specifically, the practice of medicine. This has yielded multiple interpretations of right and wrong when it comes to the body, including ideas about and practices surrounding pregnancy.

Islamic frameworks for thinking about abortion

The typical framing of the question of whether abortion ought to be legal hinges upon American Christian debates about when life begins. Muslims who get abortions don’t always ask “when does life begin?” to ascertain Islamic positions on the matter. Rather, as my research in the Abortion and Religion project and forthcoming book “Women as Humans” has found, Muslims who get abortions generally consider under what circumstances abortion would be permitted in the Islamic tradition.

Further, the Quranic verses and hadith – recorded sayings of the Prophet Muhammad – are not about abortion per se, nor the moment when life begins or whether abortion is akin to taking a life. Instead, they are descriptions for people to reflect on God’s miracle of what happens in the womb, or rahm in Arabic, which is part of God’s mercy and compassion.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/there-is-n ... -184534

[caltrek]

What the Bible Actually Says About Abortion May Surprise You
by Melanie A. Howard
July 20, 2022

Introduction:

(The Conversation) In the days since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had established the constitutional right to an abortion, some Christians have cited the Bible to argue why this decision should either be celebrated or lamented. But here’s the problem: This 2,000-year-old text says nothing about abortion.

As a university professor of biblical studies, I am familiar with faith-based arguments Christians use to back up views of abortion, whether for or against. Many people seem to assume the Bible discusses the topic head-on, which is not the case.

Ancient context

Abortions were known and practiced in biblical times, although the methods differed significantly from modern ones. The second-century Greek physician Soranus, for example, recommended fasting, bloodletting, vigorous jumping and carrying heavy loads as ways to end a pregnancy.

Soranus’ treatise on gynecology acknowledged different schools of thought on the topic. Some medical practitioners forbade the use of any abortive methods. Others permitted them, but not in cases in which they were intended to cover up an adulterous liaison or simply to preserve the mother’s good looks.

Conclusion:

Of course, Christians can develop their own faith-based arguments about modern political issues, whether or not the Bible speaks directly to them. But it is important to recognize that although the Bible was written at a time when abortion was practiced, it never directly addresses the issue.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/what-the-b ... -186983

[weatheriscool]

https://allthatsinteresting.com/moloch

[caltrek]

The History of Arizona’s Civil War-era Abortion Ban
by Nicole Narea
April 18, 2024

Introduction:

(Vox) The Republican-controlled Arizona House has repeatedly refused to take up a measure to repeal a Civil War-era state law that amounts to a near-total ban on abortion following an Arizona Supreme Court ruling earlier this month that the law can be enforced.

Democrats in the chamber — as well as both former President Donald Trump and Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, in an election-year shift toward a more moderate stance on abortion — have pushed the Arizona legislature to overturn the law. Motions to debate legislation to overturn the law have been brought three times, and each has failed. If lawmakers do not reverse it, the law could go into effect in the coming weeks, threatening access to reproductive care for about 1.6 million people of reproductive age.

It’s one of several abortion laws enacted before the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that have been revived since the justices overturned Roe in 2022. Resuscitating these laws has created legal headaches, in part because they were written in a very different time for reasons that have little in common with the concerns of anti-abortion advocates today.

Arizona’s ban, first passed in 1864 and codified again in 1901 and 1913, says anyone who “provides, supplies or administers” an abortion or abortion drugs will face a state prison sentence of two to five years unless the abortion is necessary to save the life of the person who is pregnant. Taken out of the 19th-century context in which it was passed, that language would seem to amount to a near-total ban on abortion.

But that’s not how the law was originally enforced. Few people were prosecuted under the Arizona law or similar ones in other states. At the time, first-trimester abortions were widespread and widely accepted in the public conscience.

Read more here: https://www.vox.com/politics/24128840/ ... ourt-1864