The 160-year-old Arizona abortion ban upheld Tuesday by the state’s highest court is among a wave of anti-abortion laws propelled by some historic twists and turns that may seem surprising.
For decades after the United States became a nation, abortion was legal until fetal movement was felt, usually until the second trimester. Movement, known as quickening, is the threshold because, in the hour before pregnancy tests or ultrasounds, it is the clearest sign that a woman is pregnant.
Before that point, “women could try to get an abortion without fearing that it would be illegal,” said Johanna Schoen, a professor of history at Rutgers University. After the fast, abortion providers can be charged with a misdemeanor.
“I don’t think it’s particularly stigmatized,” said Dr. Schoen. “I think what’s stigmatized is probably this idea that you’re having sex outside of marriage, but of course, married women end their pregnancies as well.”
Women will terminate pregnancies in a number of different ways, such as ingesting herbs or medicinal potions thought to induce miscarriage, said Dr. Schoen. Commonly used herbs include pennyroyal and tansy. Another method involves inserting an object into the cervix to try to interrupt the pregnancy or terminate it by causing an infection, Dr. Schoen.
Since the tools to detect early pregnancy do not yet exist, many women can honestly say that they are not sure if they are pregnant and just take herbs to get their period back.
Abortion providers describe their services in careful but widely understood terms.
“It’s open, but kind of code words,” said Mary Fissell, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Abortion drugs or herbs are called “female lunar pills” or “French renovating pills,” he said.
Newspaper advertisements make it clear that these abortion services are available.
“Abortion was commercialized in the middle of the 19th century, until the Civil War,” said Dr. Fissell. “You can’t pretend that abortion doesn’t happen.”
In the 1820s, some states began passing laws restricting abortion and establishing certain penalties for providers, according to historians.
By the 1840s, there were several high-profile trials in cases where women who had abortions or had abortions became ill or died. Some cases involved a British-born midwife, Ann Trow Summers Lohman, known as Madame Restell, who provided herbal pills and other abortion services in New Yorkwhich passed legislation where providers could be charged with manslaughter for abortions after quickening and providers and patients could be charged with misdemeanors for abortions before quickening.
But notably, a major reason for the abortion bans implemented across the country was the emergence of organized and professional medicine, historians say.
After the American Medical Association, which would later become the nation’s largest organization of doctors, formed in 1847, its members — all male and white at the time — sought to curtail the medical activities of midwives. and other nondoctors, most of whom are women. . Methods of terminating pregnancy were often provided by people in those vocations, and historians say that was one reason the association wanted to ban abortion.
A campaign that became known as the Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion began in 1857 to urge states to pass anti-abortion laws. Its leader, Dr. Horatio Robinson Storerwrote an anti-abortion paper that was officially adopted by the AMA and later published as a book entitled “On Criminal Abortion in America.”
Later, the association published “Why not? A Book for Every Woman,” which was also written by Dr. Storer, who said abortion was immoral and criminal and argued that married women had a moral and social obligation to bear children.
Dr. promoted Storer of the argument that life began at conception.
“He’s creating a kind of moral high ground bandwagon, and he’s doing that for a bunch of reasons that make it appealing,” said Dr. Fissell. In a sense, the argument coincides with the emerging medical understanding of embryology that describes pregnancy as a continuum of development and does not consider acceleration as its defining stage.
There are also social and cultural forces and biases. Women began to push for more freedom, and the male-dominated medical establishment believed that “women should be at home with babies,” said Dr. Fissell.
Racism and anti-immigrant attitudes in the second half of the 19th century began to fuel support for eugenics. Some historians have argued that these undercurrents were partly behind the anti-abortion campaign led by Dr. Storer.
“People like Storer are very concerned that the wrong Americans are reproducing, and the good white Anglo-Saxons are having abortions and not having enough children,” said Dr. Fissell.
A moralistic streak was also gaining prominence, including the passage of the Comstock Act in 1873, which banned the transmission of pornographic material and anything related to contraception or abortion.
By 1880, about 40 states had banned abortion. Arizona enacted its prohibition in 1864 as part of a legal code it adopted soon after it became a territory.
The law, ARS 13-3603, states: “A person who gives, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such a woman to take any drug, medicine or substance, or uses or uses any instrument or other means whatever, with a purpose. thereby to procure the abortion of such woman, unless necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years.”
“It’s an early one,” said Dr. Schoen, “but it was part of a whole wave of legislation that was passed between the 1860s and 1880s.”
