USA – After “Abortion”: A 1966 Book and the World That It Made

“We were all considered slightly cracked, if not outright fanatics, that first year.” —Larry Lader, Abortion II

Nov 4, 2025
By Karen Weingarten

“Abortion is the dread secret of our society.”1 So began journalist Larry Lader’s controversial book, Abortion, published in 1966 after years of rejection from publishers. If you had told Lader or the mere handful of activists then dedicated to legalizing abortion that a Supreme Court case would overturn anti-abortion laws across the US seven years later—in a January 1973 case named Roe v. Wade—they probably would have laughed. In fact, in the early 1960s when Lader began researching, it was harder to get an abortion in the US than it had been in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1966, American doctors—who were overwhelmingly white men—tightly controlled women’s reproductive options. And women of color, primarily Black and Latina women, had even fewer choices if they found themselves accidentally pregnant. Nearly 80 percent of all illegal abortion fatalities were women of color—primarily Black and Puerto Rican.2 And, worst of all, as Lader documented, deaths from illegal abortions had doubled in the preceding decade.

Continued: https://www.publicbooks.org/after-abortion-a-1966-book-and-the-world-that-it-made/

USA – ‘Good Genes,’ Anti-Abortion Laws, Declining Birth Rates, and What They Have in Common

Liz Parker, Common Dreams
Oct 12, 2025

… in America, promoting good genes and limiting access to birth control and abortion are inextricably tied by two threads: white supremacy and the patriarchy. And they have been for more than 150 years—ever since the first time abortion was criminalized in America in the late 1800s.

In the words of Leslie Reagan (author of When Abortion Was a Crime): “White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among Protestant women.”

Continued: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/anti-abortion-history-us

12.10.2025

Commentary

American Medical Association

When Abortion Was a Crime

Criminal Intimacy: Colorado’s complicated history with abortion

Maeve Conran
August 6, 2025
Podcast series in 3 parts (24 to 34 minutes each)

Criminal Intimacy is a limited series podcast by Abby O’Brien that explores Colorado’s complicated history with abortion. It tells the story of two women in 1870s Colorado — one with a tragic fate and one who took the blame. Fredricka Baunn, died in 1871 following an abortion, and Dr. Mary Solander, Colorado’s first licensed female doctor and a respected physician in the area, was found guilty of manslaughter for Fredricka’s death.

Fredricka Baunn had been impregnated by Clement Knau, a married man who did not want the child.

Continued: https://kgnu.org/criminal-intimacy-colorados-complicated-history-with-abortion/

06.08.2025

Interviews/Podcasts

Abby O'Brien

Colorado Doula Project

Criminal Intimacy

Dr. Mary Solander

Fredicka Baunn

Gina Martinez Valentina

history of abortion

history of abortion in Colorado

Abortion: A History – book review

An ambitious attempt at a history of abortion from antiquity to today is valuable and interesting, but does not consider the structures behind the patterns of change, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

17 July 2025
Elaine Graham-Leigh
Mary Fissell, Abortion: A History (Hurst & Company, 2025), vii, 288pp.Mary Fissell, Abortion: A History (Hurst & Company, 2025), vii, 288pp.

Throughout European history, women have sought to end their pregnancies. Against this constant, the attitude taken to abortion by authorities has fluctuated, with periods of repression vying with periods where abortion is accepted or at least tolerated. Fissell’s history of abortion in Europe and in America after colonisation attempts to track the ebbs and flows of repression and toleration of abortion from the ancient world to the present day.

For Fissell, the shifts for and against in attitudes to abortion over the centuries are linked to ‘larger shifts in gender relations, in the ways a society expects men and women to behave’ (p.4). This formulation doesn’t quite express the clear connection between repression of abortion and the control of the reproduction of labour through women’s oppression, seeming to reduce it to culture or interpersonal relations. It is true, as Fissell states, that ‘abortion restriction has often been gender backlash’ (p.4) but locating it purely in cultural attitudes to women’s behaviour has the effect of hiding the structural nature of abortion restriction as part of women’s oppression.

Continued: https://www.counterfire.org/article/abortion-a-history-book-review/

17.07.2025

Australia – To put an end to the abortion wars, we need mass struggle

Issue: 187
1st July 2025
Judy McVey

The global surge of attacks on abortion rights has been a wake-up call for pro-choice activists in Australia.1 In June 2022, thousands rallied in solidarity with women in the United States when Roe v Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court. Many media commentators argued that Australia was different from the US and abortion rights were safe here. After all, between 2002 and 2023, regional governments around the country removed abortion from criminal laws. Decriminalisation reflected community-wide popularity for legal abortion. Polls show that more than 80 percent of Australians believe “abortion should be legal and available in Australia in all circumstances”; anti-abortion sentiment is generally less than 10 percent.2

However, the bigots do not simply acknowledge defeat and disappear. Anti-abortionists inside and outside mainstream parties in Australia were emboldened by the rise of the far right and anti-abortion politics in the US and Europe.

Continued: https://isj.org.uk/abortion-wars-australia/

Canada – She Wanted to End Her Pregnancy. Her Abusive Partner Took Her to Court

The legal case that won Canadian women the right to abortion

by Karin Wells
Jun. 4, 2025

They met at a RadioShack in Montreal in November 1988. She was barely twenty, a waitress new to the city. He was five years older, a big man, six foot three, with a moustache. He seemed nice enough.

Chantale Daigle might have been a young, small-town girl—she was from Chibougamau, eight hours north of Montreal—but she knew her own mind. She lived with Jean-Guy Tremblay for five months, and it turned out he was not so nice. She got pregnant. One night, he knocked her to the ground and said that he would “bring her into line once and for all.”

Continued: https://thewalrus.ca/she-wanted-to-end-her-pregnancy-her-abusive-partner-took-her-to-court/

The past has been marked by periods of acceptance and intolerance of women’s bodily autonomy. Can it offer lessons for today?

By Sophie McBain
March 24, 2025

The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been. In a big city, filled with young migrant workers, there was clearly a lot of bed-hopping, and plenty of cads who could disappear and evade community pressure to arrange a shotgun wedding. A single woman who found herself pregnant and abandoned, however, had few good options. If she kept the baby, she would likely lose her job and be refused medical care. Places such as London’s Foundling Hospital would not care for babies left anonymously or born out of wedlock, because they did not want to be seen to encourage extramarital relations. Abortion was one solution, and pills were widely available in Victorian Britain and marketed using coded terms such as “female obstruction pills”, the obstruction referring to a delayed period. What made Wilson’s story unusual, then, was not that she had an abortion but that she died from one, after contracting an infection.

Continued: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2025/03/cyclical-history-of-abortion-rights

24.03.2025

self-managed abortions

Listen up, Trumpists – your idea of abortion’s history is all wrong

Mary Fissell’s fascinating book, Abortion: A History, whirls readers from Cicero’s Rome to 16th-century ‘witches’ to modern-day Ireland

Ella Whelan
01 March 2025

“A beautiful thing to watch”: that’s the phrase Donald Trump used to describe the slew of anti-abortion bills passed by American states in 2022, after “Roe v Wade”, a 50-year-old legal judgement in favour of abortion rights, was overturned by the US Supreme Court. While Trump’s personal views on abortion are unknown – over the decades, they’ve swayed with the breeze of whatever has made him popular – his recent words, not to mention the views of his vice-president JD Vance and their evangelical supporters, are the sort you hear described as “from the dark ages”. Abortion-rights activists, in fact, tend to make this kind of distinction: the “pro-choice” movement is progressive and future-oriented, and the “pro-life” (or “anti-choice”) crowd are stuck in the past.

But, according to a new book by the American historian Mary Fissell, the Trumpists’ view of abortion – “heartbeat bills”, no mercy for rape victims, a focus on the “unborn” – isn’t even an accurate representation of the past (whether that past is idolised or despised). In Abortion: A History, she charts a different timeline.

Continued: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-mary-fissell-abortion-history/

New Zealand – Remembering the lives lost to illegal abortion in NZ

Nov 29, 2024

Before abortion was decriminalised in the late 1970s, generations of New Zealand women had to risk their own lives to terminate a pregnancy.

Some took pills and potions from back-street chemists, others threw themselves down staircases, took rugged horse rides, drank gin in the bath and inserted coat hangers into their vaginas.

Until the 1970s, about 20 women a year died as a result of abortions gone wrong, historian Jock Phillips tells RNZ's Nine to Noon, and this difficult aspect of Aotearoa's history deserves to be better understood.

Continued: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/535258/remembering-the-lives-lost-to-illegal-abortion-in-nz

Dr. Nikki Colodny’s journey from psychotherapy to civil disobedience

Dr. Nikki Colodny took part in the fight to ensure access to safe abortions in Canada in the 1980s. This is the story of how she became involved with the movement and eventually decided to violate Canada’s abortion law.

by Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande
May 7, 2024

At 8:45 a.m. on September 24, 1986, Toronto police knocked on the window of Dr. Nikki Colodny’s vehicle and placed her under arrest. Taking just a moment to pack her knitting and her Holly Near cassette tape, Dr. Colodny went quietly to the courthouse where she was charged, alongside her colleagues Dr. Henry Morgentaler and Dr. Robert Scott, for conspiracy to commit a miscarriage.

Originally trained as a psychotherapist and family physician, Colodny joined the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics (OCAC) as an “envelope licker” in the early 1980s, and eventually trained as an abortion provider at Henry Morgentaler’s clinic in Montreal. From 1986 until the landmark Supreme Court decision R v Morgentaler in January 1988, Colodny provided abortions in contravention of Canadian law.

Continued: https://rabble.ca/feminism/dr-nikki-colodnys-journey-from-psychotherapy-to-civil-disobedience/