Abortion’s Long History

Abortion has been an inescapable fact of life for millennia. The question is, why do women gain or lose control over their reproductive lives at different times in history?

Linda Greenhouse
September 25, 2025 issue, NY Books (published online Sep 5)

“Abortion has long been an option for women, as far back in the historical record as we can see,” Mary Fissell, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, informs us at the start of Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion, her eye-opening account of undesired pregnancy and its intentional termination across the millennia.

Imagine if Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), in which the Supreme Court repudiated the right to abortion, began with those words instead of his presumptuous first sentence: “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” I say presumptuous because while Alito and the four justices who joined his opinion—all raised in the Catholic Church—no doubt do believe that abortion presents a “profound moral issue,” that is not a view shared by all Americans, many of whom believe that forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term is where the moral problem lies.

Continued: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/09/25/abortions-long-history-linda-greenhouse/

Why overturning Roe v. Wade only made America’s abortion rate rise

"They will never stop abortion": "After Dobbs" chronicles "the extraordinary efforts" to help women get healthcare

By Amanda Marcotte, Salon
March 25, 2025

Republican politicians owe the pro-choice community a thank you card for saving the right from the worst impacts of their policies. After the Supreme Court overturned nearly five decades of abortion rights in the infamous Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health case, the fallout has been terrible: women nearly bleeding to death in hospital parking lots, women having to be airlifted to safer states for abortions, and, unfortunately, a few highly publicized deaths because abortion bans prevented timely care. Still, the impacts have fallen far short of what anti-choice activists hoped and what pro-choice activists feared. There haven't been hospitals filling up, as they did in the days before Roe v. Wade, with patients mutilated from botched abortions. It's not because women have, en masse, given up and submitted to forced childbirth. On the contrary, the birth rate continues to decline while the abortion rate went up after the Dobbs decision.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2025/03/25/why-overturning-roe-v-wade-only-made-americas-abortion-rate-rise/

The Legacy of Dr. Warren Hern: Abortion Provider, Women’s Health Advocate and Target of Hate

1/17/2025
by Carole Joffe, Ms. Magazine

After more than 50 years of providing abortions, Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder, Colo., will retire on Jan. 22, 2025. For years, he has been one of the most high-profile abortion doctors in the United States—one of only a handful of providers to perform abortions in the late second trimester and third trimester of pregnancy.

…In a letter to Ms. executive editor Kathy Spillar reflecting on his five-plus decades in medicine, Hern described his role and his clinic as “providing the safest, most compassionate and highest quality outpatient abortion services available anywhere.”

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/01/17/warren-hern-late-abortion-care/

In spite of abortion bans, self-managed abortions are safer than ever

In an increasingly restrictive landscape, self-managed medication abortions have become a critical option

By NICOLE KARLIS, Senior Writer
MAY 5, 2024

As the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the 2022 Dobbs decision, abortion rights protesters held signs adorned with wire coat hangers. The symbol evoked memories from a pre-Roe era, when the only option to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was unsafe and potentially deadly.

As detailed by one retired gynecologist in the New York Times in 2008, the symbol of a wire coat hanger was “in no way a myth.” He recalled a period between 1948 and 1953 when women would frequently arrive in his office with a coat hanger still trapped in the cervix — and it wasn’t just coat hangers. Crochet hooks, soda bottles, and darning needles were also used in attempts to end pregnancies.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2024/05/05/in-spite-of-abortion-bans-self-managed-abortions-are-safer-than-ever/

Law protecting women seeking emergency abortions is target in US supreme court case

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act is at the heart of the court’s latest blockbuster abortion case, which comes out of Idaho

Carter Sherman
Tue 9 Jan 2024

Mylissa Farmer’s pregnancy was doomed. But no one would help her end it. Over the course of a few days in August 2022, Farmer visited two hospitals in Missouri and Kansas, where doctors agreed that because the 41-year-old’s water had broken just 18 weeks into her pregnancy, there was no chance that she would give birth to a healthy baby. Continuing the pregnancy could risk Farmer’s health and life – yet the doctors could not act.

Weeks earlier, the US supreme court had overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the national right to abortion. It was, legal counsel at one hospital determined, “too risky in this heated political environment to intervene”, according to legal filings.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/09/emergency-abortion-supreme-court-case-emtala-idaho

Ending Roe v. Wade May Have Had the Opposite Effect That Conservatives Had Hoped For

BY DAVID S. COHEN AND CAROLE JOFFE
NOV 07, 2023

On Tuesday, Ohio voters passed a ballot measure enshrining the right to an abortion in the state constitution, joining several states where voters have responded to the end of Roe v. Wade by protecting reproductive rights via popular referendum. We recently learned, however, that even without these votes, reproductive rights might be safer than many expected following the end of Roe in 2022.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the conventional wisdom was that there would be a steep drop in the number of abortions in the United States. As it turns out, though, conventional wisdom was wrong. To many observers’ surprise, two recent studies reveal that national abortion numbers have actually slightly increased since the Supreme Court ended Roe. Based on everything we know about abortion seekers and providers, however, that abortion numbers would go up in the face of Supreme Court retrenchment should have been exactly what was predicted.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/11/ohio-vote-abortion-access-is-growing.html

Pregnant with no OB-GYNs around: In Idaho, maternity care became a casualty of its abortion ban

After an Idaho hospital closed its obstetrics department, pregnant women in the county have been left without nearby care. Their OB-GYNs fled the state.

Sept. 30, 2023
By Julianne McShane

If you’re pregnant in Bonner County, Idaho, you’ll likely spend a lot of time on Route 95. Bonner General Health, a 25-bed hospital, discontinued obstetrics, labor and delivery services this year. So for residents, Route 95 is the way to the closest in-state hospital with obstetrics care, which is at least an hour’s drive south — or longer in the snowy winter.

The hospital, which staffed the county’s only OB-GYNs, cited the state’s “legal and political climate” as one of the reasons it shuttered the department. Abortion has been banned in Idaho, with few exceptions, since August 2022.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/pregnant-women-struggle-find-care-idaho-abortion-ban-rcna117872

OB-GYNs could have solidified abortion as health care after Roe. They missed their chance

By Carole Joffe
June 24, 2023

Reflecting on this first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs to overturn Roe v. Wade, I think first about the unconscionable health risks faced by pregnant people in states where abortions are now banned, when their pregnancies turn dangerous.

But the decision has also been a nightmare for physicians (mainly OB-GYNs) in those states. These doctors — not all of whom identify as “abortion providers” — are caught in the untenable position of choosing between properly caring for their patients and risking imprisonment if convicted of performing an unauthorized abortion. (In Alabama and Texas, they might face life sentences.) This situation has become so difficult for physicians and other health professional professionals that a new phrase is increasingly heard in OB-GYN circles in banned states: “moral distress.” But the story of abortion in America might have been different, if the medical profession in 1973 had taken women’s health care needs more seriously.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/24/dobbs-anniversary-abortion-rights-health-care-roe-history/

24.06.2023

Commentary

Care Post Roe

Carole Joffe

physician moral distress

PPROM

preterm pre-labor rupture of membranes

USA – With telehealth abortion, doctors have to learn to trust and empower patients

January 17, 2023
MARA GORDON

Like many pandemic-era remote workers, Robin Tucker starts her work day sitting on her sofa with a laptop, wearing soft pants and a T-shirt. But the Washington, DC-area nurse practitioner and midwife doesn't have a typical work-from-home job. She provides abortions over the Internet, a service that has only become available in the United States in the last few years.

Her career, she says, has turned out to be very different from what she learned in midwifery school, where she'd spend long shifts in a high-intensity labor and delivery unit, helping patients give birth.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/17/1140778856/with-telehealth-abortion-doctors-have-to-learn-to-trust-and-empower-patients

Demand has quadrupled at some California abortion clinics since Roe fell

Women are making ‘traumatizing’ trips across state lines for care

By MARISA KENDALL
January 1, 2023

One woman had never flown on a plane before and was petrified to make the journey from Texas to California. Another drove all night from El Paso to make her appointment because she couldn’t miss work. A third was so worried about getting in trouble that she asked the staff at Planned Parenthood if they could wipe her phone and destroy all evidence of her abortion.

Six months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, prompting about half of the states in the country to move to ban or limit abortion access, these are the kinds of stories California clinics say they are encountering on a regular basis as they continue to serve an influx of patients from Texas, Arizona and beyond.

Continued: https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/01/01/demand-has-tripled-quadrupled-at-california-abortion-clinics-since-roe-fell/