Abortion History in the United States: Why Was Abortion Banned?
Doctors led the fight to ban abortion in the 1800s. But what motivated them?
Doctors led the fight to ban abortion in the 1800s. But what motivated them?
This post previously appeared on Live Action News
Abortion Used to be Legal
Many people aren’t aware that early abortion was legal in the United States up until the mid-1800s. The dividing line was quickening- the time when the woman could feel the baby move.
Since the only way to know quickening had occurred was to ask the woman who had the abortion, abortionists were rarely prosecuted.
Pregnant women who tried to abort themselves were almost never prosecuted (in fact, I was unable to find a single example of this in my research), although in some states, even this was illegal after quickening.
But there were no restrictions on early abortion. In the early 1800s, abortionists even advertised in newspapers. (See Marvin Olasky and William J. Bennett’s Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America.)
Abortion, like all surgery then, was very dangerous. For one thing, doctors didn’t have good practices in place to prevent infections, and abortion techniques were crude and unsafe. But abortions did take place.
Why was Abortion Legal?
When the United States was founded, almost nothing was known about early fetal development. There were no pregnancy tests.
The only way a woman could be absolutely certain she was pregnant was when she felt the baby move. After all, lack of menstruation could be caused by other conditions, such as malnutrition, which was common.
Scientists didn’t even know how life began. It was widely understood that sex led to pregnancy, but there was no general consensus as to how.
One popular theory among scientists and doctors maintained that a tiny, fully formed person existed in the head of every sperm, and the woman simply provided the environment for this tiny person to develop. The ovum wasn’t observed until the early 1800s.
Many things about pregnancy and women’s bodies were unknown.
There was no widespread belief (or you could say, knowledge) that life began at conception. Most people, even educated people, didn’t even know what conception was.
Abortion History in the United States and the Fight to Ban Abortion
It was doctors who led the fight to ban abortion, but what were their motives?
First of all, doctors only started opposing abortion after the mechanism of conception was discovered, and this was determined to be the start of each individual human’s development. But was this why they opposed abortion?
What Pro-Choicers Claim
The pro-choice book Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights claims that pro-life doctors, who led the campaign to make abortion illegal at all stages in the mid-1800s, were not motivated by the idea of protecting the preborn. The book claims on page 19:
Elizabeth Kissling explains how criminalization was implemented in order “to protect women from being poisoned by dangerous abortifacient drugs sold by unscrupulous vendors” and not to protect the foetus.
It was only in the late 1800s and early 1900s that people, mostly male doctors, began to object for other reasons.
This claim was also made by Harry Blackmun in the text of Roe v. Wade and was given as one of his reasons for striking down abortion laws in 1973.
The claim can be found in the text of Roe v. Wade. (I have a hard copy of the decision, but unfortunately, I can’t find a link to the full text. I’m afraid you will have to look it up yourself.)
Blackmun used the arguments that laws against abortion were passed to protect women rather than babies, and that women weren’t prosecuted for abortion, to argue that the law never regarded embryos or fetuses as persons.
He states in Roe that doctors opposed abortion only to protect women from dangerous surgery.
But is this claim true? Let’s look at what the doctors involved in the campaign to ban abortion were saying.
The Truth
All of the quotes below were taken from Frederick N Dyer’s book, The Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion. Go here for a full list of footnotes.
The campaign to ban abortion (from conception) became a strong movement in the 1850s and 1860s.
Hugh Lenox Hodge, Professor of Obstetrics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1839, referred to abortion as a “mode of committing murder.” He wrote about abortionists “who are continually imbuing their hands and consciences in the blood of unborn infants.”
In 1851, an article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal called abortion “destruction upon the innocent” and claimed abortionists were “worse than Herod.”
Dr. Jesse Boring, in the Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal in 1857, wrote, “[O]f all the varieties of murder, that of the embryonic human being is the most atrocious and indefensible.”
Another doctor wrote in 1854:
No sophistry can do away with the fact, that whether the lamp of life is extinguished in the womb or at any period after birth, with an avowed and willful intention of taking the life of the foetus or infant, it is murder…
David Frances Condie was the Philadelphia doctor who authored Treatise on Diseases of Children, a standard medical textbook of its day.
In the American Journal of Medical Sciences, at the time the country’s leading medical publication, he wrote, referring to abortion:
[I]t is high time that our Legislature should be called upon to make such enactments as will ensure the conviction and adequate punishment of all who are concerned in the perpetration of this most demoralizing form of murder.
This was in 1855.
In 1856 a doctor stated in the Virginia Medical Journal:
The death of an embryo either by direct physical force or the administration of some noxious substance should be declared murder in the first degree.
In 1857, three doctors wrote in Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal:
The law is here fundamentally wrong.
It utterly ignores the existence of the living child, though the child is really alive from the very moment of its conception, and from that very moment is and should be considered a distinct being; this the law does not, however, recognize.
In another 1857 article, the same journal stated:
The product of conception should be looked upon as a living being, and its wanton destruction should be held as murder…
A doctor wrote in the United States Medical and Surgical Journal in 1866:
The true scientific position is this: from the moment of conception when the spermatozoa coalesces with the cell wall of the ovule, the ovum is a distinct human being …
In May of 1857, the American Medical Association set up the Committee on Criminal Abortion. It was headed by Horatio Robinson Storer, a tireless defender of the preborn. In the committee’s report, he referred to:
the grave defects of our laws, both common and statute, as regards the independent and actual existence of the child before birth, as a living being…
The case is here of life or death — the life or death of thousands — and it depends, almost wholly, upon ourselves.
Storer made a reference to “the sanctity of foetal life” and encouraged doctors to establish an “obstetric code; which…would tend to prevent such unnecessary and unjustifiable destruction of human life.”
The Committee concluded:
The Committee would advise that this body, representing as it does, the physicians of the land, publicly express its abhorrence of the unnatural and now rapidly increasing crime of abortion; that it avow its true nature, as no simple offense against public morality and decency, no mere misdemeanor, no attempt upon the life of the mother, but the wanton and murderous destruction of her child…
The minutes of the American Medical Association meeting on May 3, 1859, show that the doctors adopted the following resolution unanimously, with no doctor abstaining or objecting:
Resolved, That while physicians have long been united in condemning the act of producing abortion, in every period of gestation, except as necessary for preserving the life of either mother or child, it has become the duty of this Association, in view of the prevalence and increasing frequency of the crime, publicly to enter an earnest and solemn protest against such unwarrantable destruction of human life.
In 1860, an article in the American Journal of Medical Sciences said:
We should, as a profession, recommend to the legislative bodies of the land the revision and subsequent enforcement of all laws, statutory or otherwise, pertaining to this crime, that the present slaughter of the innocents may to some extent, at least, be made to cease.
Also in 1860, The American Medical Association composed a message to politicians, which was sent to the Governor of every state and the President. It was a call to action signed by American Medical Association President Henry Miller. It defined abortion as:
The intentional destruction of a child within its parent; and physicians are now agreed, from actual and various proof, that the child is alive from the moment of conception.
The message argued that the law “fails to recognize the unborn child as criminally affected…” It called for banning abortion for the purpose of protecting preborn children.
These quotes, and many others, show that, contrary to the claims of the previously mentioned pro-abortion book, doctors did indeed argue for protecting the preborn from the very beginning of the movement, well before “the late 1800s and early 1900s.”
Having read this article, I hope I’ve convinced you that pro-choice activists (and Justices) lied about why abortion was banned.
What else are they lying about?
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Or download a short book I wrote on babies born alive during botched abortions here.