HISTORY OF ABORTION

Over several centuries and in different cultures, there is a rich history of women helping each
other to abort. Until the late 1800s, women healers in Western Europe and the U.S. provided
abortions and trained other women to do so, without legal prohibitions.

The State didn't prohibit abortion until the 19th century, nor did the Church lead in this new
repression. In 1803, Britain first passed antiabortion laws, which then became stricter
throughout the century. The U.S. followed as individual states began to outlaw abortion. By
1880, most abortions were illegal in the U.S., except those ``necessary to save the life of the
woman.'' But the tradition of women's right to early abortion was rooted in U.S. society by then;
abortionists continued to practice openly with public support, and juries refused to convict them.

Abortion became a crime and a sin for several reasons. A trend of humanitarian reform in the
mid-19th century broadened liberal support for criminalization, because at that time abortion
was a dangerous procedure done with crude methods, few antiseptics, and high mortality rates.
But this alone cannot explain the attack on abortion. For instance, other risky surgical
techniques were considered necessary for people's health and welfare and were not prohibited.
``Protecting'' women from the dangers of abortion was actually meant to control them and
restrict them to their traditional child-bearing role. Antiabortion legislation was part of an
antifeminist backlash to the growing movements for suffrage, voluntary motherhood, and other
women's rights in the 19th century. *For more information, see Linda Gordon's Woman's Body,
Woman's Right, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

At the same time, male doctors were tightening their control over the medical profession.
Doctors considered midwives, who attended births and performed abortions as part of their
regular practice, a threat to their own economic and social power. The medical establishment
actively took up the antiabortion cause in the second half of the 19th century as part of its effort
to eliminate midwives.

Finally, with the declining birth rate among whites in the late 1800s, the U.S. government and
the eugenics movement warned against the danger of ``race suicide'' and urged white, native-
born women to reproduce. Budding industrial capitalism relied on women to be unpaid
household workers, low-paid menial workers, reproducers, and socializers of the next
generation of workers. Without legal abortion, women found it more difficult to resist the
limitations of these roles.

Then, as now, making abortion illegal neither eliminated the need for abortion nor prevented its
practice. In the 1890s, doctors estimated that there were two million abortions a year in the U.S.
(compared with one and a half million today). Women who are determined not to carry an
unwanted pregnancy have always found some way to try to abort. All too often, they have
resorted to dangerous, sometimes deadly methods, such as inserting knitting needles or coat
hangers into the vagina and uterus, douching with dangerous solutions like lye, or swallowing
strong drugs or chemicals. The coat hanger has become a symbol of the desperation of millions
of women who have risked death to end a pregnancy. When these attempts harmed them, it
was hard for women to obtain medical treatment; when these methods failed, women still had to
find an abortionist.