A motive of the anti-abortionists that no one talks openly about...

[dixiegrrrrl]

According to several recent histories, the American Medical Association was the primary force behind the anti-abortion laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As writers James Risen and Judy L. Thomas point out, doctors had a natural stake in efforts to restrict abortion. Highlighting the abuses and dangers of abortion helped encourage the professionalization of medical practice, while limiting competition from midwives and other “irregular” healers who provided abortion services. Historian Leslie J. Reagan argues that doctors gained moral authority — and a further competitive edge — by positioning themselves as paternalistic arbiters of female reproductive behavior.

The doctors’ campaign was reinforced by the growing fears of “race suicide” among Americans of Anglo-Saxon heritage. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, many of them Catholic, were flooding into the United States at the same time that birth rates were declining among white Protestants. Abortion came to be seen as part of a demographic calamity facing the white upper classes. As Reagan puts it, “White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among white Protestant women” (Reagan, 11). Lawmakers responded by imposing ever-tighter restrictions on abortion, largely eliminating the earlier distinctions between operations performed before and after quickening.

From a web article focusing on Washington state's historic pro-abortion referendum, "the first -- and so far the only -- state to do so through a vote of the people.

[guillaumeb]

1. Do you have a link?

[hunter]

4. Perhaps here...

Abortion Reform in Washington State

On November 3, 1970, Washington voters approved Referendum 20, which legalized abortion in the early months of pregnancy. Fifteen other states had liberalized their abortion laws by that time, but Washington was the first -- and so far the only -- state to do so through a vote of the people. It was a triumphant moment in a campaign that had its genesis in 1967, in the office of Seattle psychologist Samuel Goldenberg (1921-2011), who had been asked to help two patients, one middle-aged and the other a young college student, both desperate for a way to end an unwanted pregnancy.

--more--

https://www.historylink.org/File/5313

I'll say it. Anyone who wants to reduce abortions ought to be promoting birth control and the empowerment of women. My parent's, and my wife's parents came around to that position by having lots of children, as celebrated by their religion. I was changing a younger sibling's diapers when I was ten years old. That's when my "Choose Life" mom (she even had it on the license plate frames of her car) became an advocate for birth control.

My mom always said if we had kids before we were married to bring them home. The thought was so terrifying to me and my siblings, all of us crammed into a three bedroom house with a crazy grandma too, and eating cheap food bought in bulk, eating generic corn flakes drenched in reconstituted instant milk that tasted vaguely of chlorine, that none of us had children until we were living on our own, married, and able to support them. It wasn't just the crowd, there would have been heaps of guilt about our poor choices too.

My wife's family is similar.

I'd rather be that kind of Catholic than a fascist white Catholic, terrified that my "race" would soon be extinct.

My wife and I had a big Catholic wedding that my grandpa boycotted because men in his Wild West family didn't marry, in his words, "Mexican girls." To his credit, he got over it.

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. This article helped me understand why I could not get my tubes tied back then.

Young bride, had 2 marvelous lil boys 18 months apart, no effective birth control yet back then, did not want any more because of difficulties with pg 2nd time.
asked my ob/gyn (man, of course) in 1970, can I get my tubes tied? ( Women's Rights and that, I was getting uppity)

he informed me there was a procedure:

I had to get my husband's written permission on a form.. ooops.. "No wife of mine is gonna get sterilized, you'll start running around on me"
I had to be ok'd by 2 medical docs and one shrink that I was not crazy for not wanting to have a herd of kids.
and the number of kids I had times my age had to reach some number north of 200 something.
Seriously.
Did I mention we were/are white?

OTOH, my husband could get a vasectomy at any time, no discussion with even me needed, no seeing more docs, etc.
He had it done on his lunch hour, total surprise.

but, it gets better.
1972, divorced his cheating ass, went on welfare, which back then did help a lot more than they do now, had Medicaid, and guess what?
They were only too happy to sterilize a welfare Mom, because, you know, THOSE women.
No questions, no screenings, no shrink, nothing.
so I did it. Never one second of regret, either.

2 years later I got my BA, was off welfare, and doing well.
AND, those boys grew up to be fine men who both decided, on their own, decades ago they did not want to bring any more children into an over populated world, so they both made a permanent choice.

their dad is not happy in the corner he painted himself into.

[hunter]

12. That's around the time my youngest sibling was born...

... and my mom was getting seriously, as you put it, "uppity," and itching to go back to the career she'd been excluded from when she first got pregnant. And she did return, full fury.

Overall, me and my siblings reproduced at less than the replacement rate, as did my wife's siblings.

It wasn't generally by abstinence.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. Hunter kindly provided it, below.

Sorry for my omission.

[SunSeeker]

2. Yep. Race preservation is why Hitler was anti-abortion. nt

[WhiteTara]

3. I'd like to use this but need a citation

I accept both those premises being true, but my editor demands links.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. Here....

https://www.historylink.org/File/5313

Nice long article. I was very much involved up there at the time.

[WhiteTara]

10. thanks

[JudyM]

5. The AMA ought to be investigated, IMO, on the basis of first do no harm. They've done plenty.

Of course that’s not the standard they’d be held to, but ought to be.

[hunter]

11. The AMA is not what it was. It has been captured by the pharmaceutical industry.

They pump up their membership with steeply discounted or free memberships for medical students and residents who tend not to renew their memberships when they graduate.

They don't represent the majority of physicians.

[JudyM]

13. What it was when it started was nothing to be proud of either, in terms of shoving out complementary

and alternative/integrative care. Sure, it’s great to have rigorous uniform standards for med schools, but it took control of too much of our health care system.

[mshasta]

9. I notice that prolife protestors

Stay away from “bad minority’s areas “ they always hanging around clinics where most of whites areas