Abortion was not just legal—it was a safe, condoned,
and practiced procedure in colonial America and common enough to appear in the
legal and medical records of the period. Official abortion laws did not appear
on the books in the United States until 1821, and abortion before quickening
did not become illegal until the 1860s. If a woman living in New England in the
17th or 18th centuries wanted an abortion, no legal, social, or religious force
would have stopped her.
That, however, is not the way the anti-abortion
movement likes to paint the history of abortion in the United States.
Anti-abortion organizations such as the National Right to Life spin a narrative
in which legal abortion is a historical anomaly and an unnatural consequence of
modern America’s loose moral standards. On the National Right to Life’s
website, for example, a page titled “Abortion History Timeline” describes “a
few rogue doctors and midwives” performing abortions in early America, only “as
far back as the 1850s.” In reality, trusted midwives and medical practitioners
performed abortions from the beginning of American colonial life and throughout
world history. Fox News also falsifies American abortion history on its
website. On a page titled “Fast Facts: History of U.S. Abortion Laws,” it
claims that abortion in the American colonies “was ruled a misdemeanor if
performed prior to quickening.”
Other anti-abortion groups such as the Family
Research Council claim that abortion could not have had “foundation in the text
of the Constitution”—overlooking the fact that when the Constitution was
written, abortion was legal until quickening. Americans United for Life makes
the same mistake on its website, misconstruing a quote from Thomas
Jefferson—“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is
the first and only legitimate object of good government”—as being
anti-abortion. Americans United for Life also describes itself on its website
as working to “restore a culture of life.” Of course, when the founding fathers
met in a sweltering hall in Pennsylvania to declare independence, such a
culture was not even a twinkle in their eyes.
Puritans, sex, and legal abortion
To many people, the facts about abortion’s legality
in early America can be surprising. This is partly thanks to the American
imagination, which paints the Puritans—the first English settlers on American
soil to focus on creating communities and families—as strict, foreboding
people, incapable of joy or laughter, let alone sexual pleasure. This popular
perception is drawn partly from books such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter, which portrays Puritan society as deeply religious, dark, and
unforgiving. It is hard for modern Americans to believe that a society as pious
and austere as the Puritans’ New England—the cultural and legal parent of much
of early American communal life—tolerated a controversial procedure such as
abortion.
In reality, the Puritans were much more lighthearted
than is commonly thought, and in some ways, they were quite progressive when it
came to sexual conduct. Puritans believed that marital sex for pleasure was
important and that marriage was a contract of love, not just economics.
Although premarital and extramarital sexual relationships were illegal, they
were so common that enforcement was never very strict. The legal documents of
the time are rampant with recorded “sexual offenses,” and the percentage of
firstborn children born early or completely out of wedlock hovered at around 40
percent during the colonial era. Since the Puritans believed that one could be
godly without children and that life began when a mother felt her baby kick,
their strict religious code had no need to outlaw abortion before quickening.
The Puritans brought their laws on abortion from
merry old England, where the procedure was also legal until quickening.
Although the Puritans changed much of England’s legal system when they
established their “city upon a hill,” they kept abortion as a part of Puritan
family life, allowing women to choose when and if they would become
mothers—whether for the first time or the fifth time.
Colonial women procured pre-quickening abortions
mainly with the help of other women in their communities; skilled midwives knew
which herbs could cause a woman to abort, and early American medical books even
gave instructions for “suppressing the courses,” or inducing an abortion. Much
of what we know about abortion in 18th-century America comes from the case of
Sarah Grosvenor, a young woman who died from a late-term surgical abortion in
Connecticut in 1742. Surgical abortions were rare and dangerous; most abortions
in this period were induced by herbal abortifacients. Sarah’s case entered the
legal record after the doctor who performed her abortion was brought to court
for murdering the young woman and her unborn child—the abortion was illegal
since it took place after quickening. Cornelia Hughes Dayton, however, an early
American historian who has researched the case extensively, points out that
when Sarah first tried to abort her child by “taking the trade”—ingesting
herbal abortifacients—the women of her community were not surprised by her
actions. They were familiar with abortion and were not troubled by its ethical
implications.
The campaign to criminalize abortion
Acceptance of early-term abortion changed during the
19th century as Victorian sensibilities took hold. By 1910 abortion—except in
cases to save the mother’s life—was a criminal procedure in every state except
Kentucky, where the courts declared the procedure to be judicially illegal. The
new restrictions on abortion were caused by many factors, including changing
social, class, and family dynamics in the early 19th century. Americans in the
Victorian era thought abortion was a problem brought on by upper-class white
women, who were choosing to start their families later and limit their size.
Increased female independence was also perceived as a threat to male power and
patriarchy, especially as Victorian women increasingly volunteered outside the
home for religious and charitable causes.
During the mid-19th century, American physicians
also began to battle “irregular” doctors, such as homeopaths and midwives, in
an attempt to assert the authority and legitimacy of male-dominated scientific
medicine. To tackle these irregular doctors, the “scientific” physicians
attacked legal abortion because it was midwives and other “unscientific”
medical practitioners who safely performed the procedure. White men were also
concerned by shifting ethnic and racial dynamics in the United States, worrying
that the low birthrate of the white upper class would lead to racial inferiors
and un-American immigrants overrunning the country.
Together, a coalition of male doctors backed by the
American Medical Association, the Catholic Church, and sensationalist
newspapers began to campaign for the criminalization of abortion. By the turn
of the century, this coalition had largely succeeded in limiting women’s
medical choices. According to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in her book Disorderly
Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, restricting abortion was one
way that male physicians could “assert clear authority” over their female
patients. The Victorian anti-abortion movement portrayed women who terminated
their pregnancies as unnatural and selfish, undermining the expected,
patriotic, and godly role of the American woman—that of wife and mother.
After abortion was made a criminal offense at the
close of the Victorian era, it would not become legal again until 1973, when
the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling declared that all women had the
right to terminate a pregnancy until the fetus was viable outside the womb. The
decision came after years of legal, political, and religious advocacy on behalf
of women and their reproductive health and rights. In the roughly 100 years
when abortion was illegal in the United States, women suffered and died from
botched abortions, with as many as 5,000 women dying every year in the decades
leading up to the ruling. After Roe v. Wade, deaths and hospitalizations
resulting from unsafe abortions effectively ended in this country. When
abortion was legal in early America, it was considered at least as safe as
delivering a child at term, and today abortion is considered an extremely safe
procedure. But when a woman’s right to an abortion is restricted, the operation
turns risky: Today approximately 68,000 women around the world die each year
from unsafe abortions.
The case for contraception
The notion that contraception, like abortion, is a
relatively new phenomenon is also wildly distorted. Since ancient times women
and men have been using a variety of contraceptive methods beyond abstinence,
and the pill is the only type of birth control that was not available until
recent decades. Contraceptive methods historically include everything from
“pulling out” to diaphragms and condoms. Distribution of and public education
about birth control was legal in the United States until 1873, when the
infamous Comstock Act was passed.
The act, which declared that information about birth
control was “obscene,” grew out of sentiments similar to those that spurred the
anti-abortion movement. It also led 24 states to pass similar restrictions;
collectively, the federal and state restrictions were known as Comstock laws.
Margaret Sanger, the well-known crusader for birth control and founder of what
is now called Planned Parenthood, was arrested for violating Comstock laws
while attempting to educate desperate women about how they could better control
their own bodies and their families by using contraception.
It was not until 1965 that the last Comstock laws
left standing in the United States were ruled unconstitutional. In Griswold v.
Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled that married women in every state had the
right to access birth control. But unmarried women had to wait until the 1972
Supreme Court ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird to gain the same right.
Painting the past, protecting the future
Abortion and contraception are not new. They are not
a product of modernity or rising secularism or a reflection of the downfall of
the traditional family. Throughout history, women and their partners have
chosen to limit their families for the sake of their health, happiness, and
economic viability. Men and women frequently made these choices without the
guilty association of sin; whether abortion and contraception were legal often
had nothing to do with a society’s piety. Instead, the legal status of abortion
was tied to a society’s outlook regarding sex and gender, with religion giving
a moral high ground to either side of the argument.
Many people imagine our history in a way that is
more fantasy than reality, assigning values and morals that they wish
contemporary society possessed to our nation’s founders. But imagining quaint
and pious scenes does not make them true. The Scarlet Letter’s bleak and unforgiving
portrayal of Puritan sexuality is more a reflection of the Victorian sexual
standards of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s era than the sexual values of his ancestors’
days. In reality, female sexuality in the Puritan and colonial period was in
many ways more liberated than in Hawthorne’s days; it was only years later that
chastity became the prized virtue of the American woman.
Today, when anti-abortion groups proclaim their
version of history and discuss the founders or rogue doctors, they are imposing
their own moral vision on an unhistorical past. The anti-abortion movement’s
imagined reality—in which colonial Americans believed that life began at
conception, championed the rights of the “unborn,” and prevented female sexual
freedom—is just plain wrong, regardless of the true ethical questions
surrounding abortion. Sexual values surrounding abortion and birth control have
changed with time and cultures, a historical truth that everyone on the
political spectrum must recognize. If an honest discussion about abortion and
birth control is to take place, we must appreciate their progressive place in
our history and make sure we are not moving backwards in time.
About the author: Ranana Dine is an intern with the
Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
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