The History Behind Arizona’s 160-Year-Old Abortion Ban

The state’s Supreme Court ruled that the 1864 law is enforceable today. Here is what led to its enactment.

By Pam Belluck
April 10, 2024

The 160-year-old Arizona abortion ban that was upheld on Tuesday by the state’s highest court was among a wave of anti-abortion laws propelled by some historical twists and turns that might seem surprising.

For decades after the United States became a nation, abortion was legal until fetal movement could be felt, usually well into the second trimester. Movement, known as quickening, was the threshold because, in a time before pregnancy tests or ultrasounds, it was the clearest sign that a woman was pregnant.

Unlocked: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/health/arizona-abortion-ban-history.html

A brief history of abortion – from ancient Egyptian herbs to fighting stigma today

September 21, 2023
Alisha Palmer

You might be forgiven for thinking of abortion as a particularly modern phenomenon. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that abortion has been a constant feature of social life for thousands of years. The history of abortion is often told as a legal one, yet abortion has continued regardless of, perhaps even in spite of, legal regulation.

The need to regulate fertility before or after sex has existed for as long as pregnancy has. The Ancient Egyptian Papyrus Ebers is often seen as some of the first written evidence of abortion practice.

Continued: https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-abortion-from-ancient-egyptian-herbs-to-fighting-stigma-today-213033

Opinion: Madame Restell, and the history of abortion in America

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD
July 10, 2023

Last year, as we watched the U.S. Supreme Court destroy reproductive freedom for women, more attention was paid to the outcome of the Dobbs abortion case than the Court’s reasoning and justification. Justice Samuel Alito, Dobbs author, relied heavily on history in supporting his opinion.

What happened in earlier American history is contested terrain. I would submit that Justice Alito got his history very wrong. He argued that abortion was not deeply rooted in U.S. history and traditions. Alito wrote, “…an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

Continued: https://www.concordmonitor.com/My-Turn-Abortion-history-Madame-Restell-and-the-revival-of-Comstockery-51539521

10.07.2023

American Historical Association

American Medical Association

New York State Society for the Suppression of Vice

quickening

Samuel Alito

Abortion is ancient history: Long before Roe, women terminated pregnancies

By Katie Hunt, CNN
Fri June 23, 2023

Abortion today, at least in the United States, is a political, legal and moral powder keg. But for long stretches of history, terminating an unwanted pregnancy, especially in the early stages, was a relatively uncontroversial fact of life, historians say.

Egyptian papyrus, Greek plays, Roman coins, the medieval biographies of saints, medical and midwifery manuals, and Victorian newspaper and pamphlets reveal that abortion was more common in premodern times than people might think.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/23/health/abortion-is-ancient-history-and-that-matters-today-scn/index.html

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

For most of history, we haven’t had abortion laws, and we don’t need them now

Let's leave abortion out of the legal system entirely, writes contributor Ainsley Hawthorn

Ainsley Hawthorn · for CBC News
Dec 28, 2022

According to a new study from Angus Reid, three out of five Canadians believe Canada needs a law to guarantee access to abortion.

Canada is one of the few countries in the world without any abortion law on the books. Instead, abortion is treated like other medical procedures and regulated by provincial and territorial health authorities.

Continued: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-history-abortion-1.6694080

28.12.2022

Abortion in Colonial America: A Time of Herbal Remedies and Accepted Actions

UConn historians discuss abortion in Colonial America

August 22, 2022
Kimberly Phillips

Two hundred eighty years ago, nine generations in the past, more than four decades before the signing of the U.S. Constitution – and Sarah Grosvenor had the ability to choose.

In towns like Pomfret, that eventually would comprise the new country, women had a name for what the teen did. Sometime in May 1742 she started “taking the trade,” or an abortifacient to induce a miscarriage. The herbs, berries, and plants in the recipe were plentiful in New England, oftentimes cultivated by women for women.

Continued: https://today.uconn.edu/2022/08/abortion-in-colonial-america-a-time-of-herbal-remedies-and-accepted-actions/

‘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

The state fighting to dismantle abortion rights has a long history of permissive abortion laws

by Isabelle Taft
June 8, 2022

When Mississippi asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, it argued that a long tradition of state restrictions on abortion in the U.S. “defeats any claim of a deeply rooted right” to an abortion.

Yet for all but 21 of its 156 years as a state prior to Roe, Mississippi law technically permitted abortion for any reason until about 16 weeks of pregnancy.

Continued: https://mississippitoday.org/2022/06/08/mississippi-abortion-history/

What Alito Gets Wrong About the History of Abortion in America

Abortion in early pregnancy was not only commonplace but widely regarded as morally acceptable.

Opinion by LESLIE J. REAGAN
06/02/2022

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.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/02/alitos-anti-roe-argument-wrong-00036174