“Abortionist”: The Label That Turns Healthcare Workers Into Criminals

The moniker has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence.

KATIE HERCHENROEDER, Mother Jones
May/June 2024 issue (posted April 15)

In 2007, after Paul Ross Evans pleaded guilty to leaving a bomb outside of a women’s health clinic in Austin, he assured the judge: He never meant for anyone to get hurt. “Except,” he clarified, “for the abortionists.”

For almost two centuries, the moniker “abortionist” has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence. Before Roe v. Wade, the label turned midwives and doctors into criminals to be cracked down on by the state. After the 1973 decision, right-wing movements continued to deploy the term to imply only back-alley doctors performed abortions.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/abortionist-the-label-that-turns-healthcare-workers-into-criminals/

Abortion in America: How access and attitudes have changed through the centuries

by: Eliza Siegel, Stacker
Jul 28, 2023

The Postal Service can legally deliver abortion medications in the U.S.—including to states with abortion restrictions or bans—according to a Justice Department decision posted online late Jan. 3. The Postal Service requested that the Justice Department provide guidance on this issue a week after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in June 2022. That ruling, which sparked intense debate across the U.S., led to abortion restrictions and bans in many states.

In its decision, the Justice Department ruled that sending, delivering, and receiving abortion drugs by mail is not in violation of the 1873 Comstock Act —which aimed to prevent morally “corrupt” items from being delivered by mail—because there is no way to determine that the intent of the recipient is to commit an unlawful act. There are also no federal restrictions on the drugs in question.

Continued: https://www.ksnt.com/news/abortion-in-america-how-access-and-attitudes-have-changed-through-the-centuries/

Abortion was once common practice in America. A small group of doctors changed that

January 19, 2023
Rund Abdelfatah
6-Minute Listen with Transcript

The 50th anniversary of the Roe V. Wade decision is Jan. 22. NPR's podcast Throughline examines the debate about abortion, which wasn't always controversial.

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
This week, it'll mark 50 years since the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion a constitutionally protected right - at least for 49 years. In U.S. history, though, abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America, it was considered a fairly common practice, a private decision made by women and aided mostly by midwives. But in the mid-1800s, a small group of physicians set out to change that. Led by a zealous young doctor named Horatio Storer, they launched a campaign to make abortion illegal in every state. Here are hosts Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah from our history podcast Throughline.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/19/1149924325/abortion-was-once-common-practice-in-america-a-small-group-of-doctors-changed-th

When It Comes To Abortion Rights, Canada Can’t Save You

As long as Americans are fighting, again, for their right to choose, they should fight for better than what we have in Canada. Trust me.

by CARLA CICCONE
Oct. 27, 2022

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested that Americans are welcome to use the Canadian health care system, and the abortions it provides, I scoffed.

Offering the Canadian health care system to American abortion seekers is a nice sentiment from someone whose country decriminalized abortion in 1988, but the reality is that much of Canadian health care is currently in shambles. As a Canadian woman who has covered the issue, and experienced it personally, I know that abortion care in this country is uneven at best.

Continued: https://www.romper.com/life/midwives-abortion-roe-canada-america

‘Thank the lord, I have been relieved’: the truth about the history of abortion in America

Abortion in the 19th-century US was widely accepted as a means of avoiding the risks of pregnancy. The idea of banning or punishing it came later

by Tamara Dean
Tue 12 Jul 2022

At our rural county’s historical society, the past lives loosely in bulletins, news clippings, maps and handwritten index cards. It’s pieced together by pale, grey-haired women who sit at oak tables and pore over old photos. Western sun filters in, half-lighting the women as they name who’s pictured, who has passed on. Other volunteers gossip and cut obituaries from local newspapers.

I was sent here by hearsay. For years, my neighbour has claimed that the old cemetery in the low-lying field on my Wisconsin property contains more bodies than the scant number of tombstones indicates. The epic flood of 1978 washed away the markers of the nameless – civil war soldiers, he says. I want to know who the dead were in life. After many walks through the cemetery, I’m familiar with the markers that remain. One narrow footstone reads simply: “MAS”. Three marble headstones rest at odd angles among the box elder trees. Stained, eroded and lichen-crusted, the stones belong to a boy and two baby girls who died in the 1850s and 60s. On the boy’s is a relief of a weeping willow; on the sisters’ are rosebuds. Signs of young lives cut short.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/12/thank-the-lord-i-have-been-relieved-when-abortion-was-safer-than-childbirth

Abortion was once common practice in America. A small group of doctors changed that

June 6, 2022
Ramtin Arablouei, Rund Abdelfatah
8-Minute Listen, with Transcript

Abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America it would have been considered a fairly common practice. But in the mid-1800s, a small group of physicians set out to change that.

SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
In U.S. history, abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America, it was considered a fairly common practice, a private decision made by women and aided mostly by midwives. But in the mid-1800s, a small group of physicians set out to change that. Led by a zealous young doctor named Horatio Storer, they launched a campaign to make abortion illegal in every state. Hosts Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah from our history podcast Throughline bring us the story.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/06/1103372543/abortion-was-once-common-practice-in-america-a-small-group-of-doctors-changed-th

06.06.2022

USA – What Back Alley? These Women Say DIY Abortion Can Be Empowering

What Back Alley? These Women Say DIY Abortion Can Be Empowering
The pro-choice movement has portrayed non-clinic abortion as a last resort. But some women are trying to change that image.

Emily Shugerman
01.04.19

The image provokes both fear and fury: a wire coat hanger, spattered with blood, symbolizing the drastic measures women may take when abortion access is limited.

Whoopi Goldberg brandished one on stage at the 2004 March for Women’s Lives, urging the younger generation to remember what their forebears used. Protesters at the 1989 March for Women's Equality carried a giant replica, stained red, through the streets of Washington D.C. like a macabre parade float. And the symbol has been ubiquitous since Donald Trump’s election, popping up at marches, in the pages of glossy magazines, and on this site.

The imagery makes Jill Adams, founder of the Self-Induced Abortion Legal Team, shake her head.

Continued: https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-back-alley-these-women-say-diy-abortion-can-be-empowering?ref=scroll

04.01.2019

American Council of Gynecologists and Obstetricians

jailing women for abortion

Jamila Perritt

Jane Collective

Jill Adams

Knoxville Abortion Doula Collective

medication abortion

mifepristone

misoprostol

Physicians for Reproductive Health

Planned Parenthood

prosecuting women for abortion

self-induced abortion

Self-Induced Abortion Legal Team

self-managed abortion

Self-managed Abortion Safe and Supported

Aborted Fetus And Pill Bottle In 19th Century New York Outhouse Reveal History Of Family Planning

Aborted Fetus And Pill Bottle In 19th Century New York Outhouse Reveal History Of Family Planning

April 20, 2018
Kristina Killgrove , Contributor

The archaeological discovery of presumably aborted fetuses in outhouses in New York along with pill bottles and historical records have led researchers to conclude that many 19th century American women had family-planning concerns similar to those of 21st century women.

Writing in this month's Historical Archaeology journal, archaeologist Andrea Zlotucha Kozub of the Public Archaeology Facility at Binghamton University details her discovery of fetal remains and associated artifacts in two upstate New York domestic outhouses. Although potential aborted fetuses have been previously found in an outhouse associated with a 19th century brothel in Manhattan, Zlotucha Kozub's study is the first to find this sort of evidence from middle-class houses.

Continued: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2018/04/20/aborted-fetus-and-pill-bottle-in-19th-century-new-york-outhouse-reveal-history-of-family-planning/#3c1d063c75a1

Inside the Top-Secret Abortion Underground

Inside the Top-Secret Abortion Underground
Code names, top-secret training, and a movement of women determined to avoid the medical establishment.

Nina Liss-Schultz
Mother Jones, March/April 2018 Issue

On a summer day in 2015, Renata and more than a dozen women, all strangers from different parts of the country, sat in a semicircle on the living-room floor of a house, deep in the rural South. A lean twentysomething with a wide smile and olive skin, Renata was the only nonwhite person in the group. And she felt conspicuous in other ways too—many of the women struck her as kind of “new agey,” and some had been involved in a “crystal energetics” midwifery program. All of them had big red binders full of worksheets and documents related to the topic at hand: how to help women self-induce an abortion. “My initial thought,” she recalls, “is, ‘What the fuck did I get myself into?'”

Renata had come from Arizona to attend the weeklong training. She learned how, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white male doctors consolidated their professional power in part by sidelining female and often nonwhite midwives and other community healers. She learned which drugs and herbs induce a miscarriage and where to buy the small, plastic, strawlike instrument that is inserted into the uterus and suctions out an unwanted pregnancy. If problems arise, what should one say to avoid scrutiny at the emergency room? In which states is self-induced abortion, and helping women self-induce, a crime?

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/02/inside-the-top-secret-abortion-underground/

The Criminalization of Abortion Began as a Business Tactic

The Criminalization of Abortion Began as a Business Tactic
By Erin Blakemore // January 22, 2018

If you opened up the Leavenworth Times, a Kansas newspaper, in the 1850s, you’d see an ad for Sir James Clarke’s Female Pills. These pills, the advertiser bragged, were ideal for bringing on women’s periods—and were “particularly suited to married ladies.”

Then there was Madame Costello, a “female physician” who took out an ad in the New York Herald in the 1840s. She advertised to women “who wish to be treated for obstruction of the monthly period.”

Continued: http://www.history.com/news/the-criminalization-of-abortion-began-as-a-business-tactic