Sarah Farbman is currently studying French and linguistics at Grinnell College and hopes to be an astronaut-ballerina someday.
We all know that abortion is a huge deal in America right now, politically speaking. Even people who don’t follow politics at all will pick a side and defend it to the death. I am willing to bet, however, that many, if not most, Americans are thoroughly ignorant of abortion history pre-Roe v. Wade and even of Roe v. Wade itself. How can we fight back and forth — and about something that intimately and permanently changes lives — without any knowledge of the historical context? At the beginning of the 19th century, abortion was legal in the United States. It was slowly criminalized over the course of the century until, by 1900, it was illegal throughout the country, with severe penalties in place for any who sought, performed, advertised, or even talked about the procedure.
Today, there are certain arguments that we generally associate with the abortion debate: when life begins, for example, or a woman’s right to self-determination. Interestingly, the arguments motivating the criminalization of abortion in the 19th century were quite different and included paternalistic protection of women, the professional dominance of doctors, and the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race.
In Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History, N.E.H. Hull and Peter Charles Hoffer offer a timeline of the criminalization of abortion throughout the 19th century[1]. The practice was legal and unregulated until the first abortion statute, passed in Connecticut in 1821. Other states soon followed. In the early laws, abortion was legal until “quickening,” or when the woman first felt the fetus kick, when life was considered to have begun. Further, the woman was considered the victim in the crime of abortion. Consequently, the only way to persecute the crime of abortion was for a woman to press charges against her abortionist and to testify that quickening had happened. These early abortion laws were designed to scare off incompetent abortionists and protect women. These “paternalistic” statutes, as Hull and Hoffer call them, contrast with the “misogynistic” laws passed later in the century, designed to protect the fetus. Under these laws, abortion was illegal at any time, and any woman who attempted abortion was a felon.
Of course, abortion laws weren’t being passed in a vacuum. To understand the 19th century abortion debate, it is necessary to look at some patterns affecting contemporary society, such as the consolidation of the medical profession. Today, the American medical profession has regulatory institutions, and being a doctor is a fairly high-prestige position with a lot of authority in society. This wasn’t always the case. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the people that we today think of as doctors were known as “regular” or “orthodox” doctors or physicians and competed with midwives, homeopaths, and many others for authority and business. Throughout the course of the century, the medical profession became more formal and gained more authority. In the 19th century, it was regular physicians who led the push to criminalize abortion. Historian James Mohr postulates that this was a move for power[2]. Abortion was associated with midwives. If Regular physicians could criminalize abortion, they could take business away from midwives and lower the prestige of that profession, thus enhancing their own position.
In their article “Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America,” Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay suggest an even more sinister motivation for making abortion illegal, one of racial power[3]. 19th-century ideas of race were different from our 21st century conception. Where we see “White,” the 19th century American would have seen Anglo-Saxon, Irish or Celtic, Hebrew, Italian, and others. The Anglo-Saxon “race,” those descended from English settlers, was at the top of the hierarchy. At this time, Anglo-Saxon dominance was in trouble. During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of men were killed, and most of them were Anglo-Saxon. Between that massive loss, the unprecedented influx of members of other races, and dropping birth rates in general, the Anglo-Saxon population, and with it Anglo-Saxon dominance, was losing ground. There was a general correlation between social class and abortion methods. Lower class women tended to abort manually, with coat-hangers or other methods, while upper class women tended to buy abortifacients from pharmacists. It was the abortifacients that were made unavailable. Thus, upper class women were explicitly forbidden to abort, while lower class women were implicitly allowed to as abortion became a battle ground for racial superiority.
The abortion debate today is terribly polemic. Women’s lives are at stake. It is imperative that we expose the hidden structures that have historically ruled this controversy. Only then can we see the forces that rule the contemporary debate. Only then will we have the wisdom necessary to step back, listen to each other, and really, truly help people.
[1] Hull, N.E.H. and Peter Charles Hoffer. “Abortion Becomes a Crime, 1800-1900.” In Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History, 11-48. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
[2] Mohr, James. Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of Natural Policy, 1800-1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
[3] Beisel, Nicola and Tamara Kay. “Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America.” American Sociological Review, 69 (Aug. 2004): 498-518. url: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3593062
