Exploring the complicated history of abortion in the United States - PBS NewsHour Read it and weep

[question everything]

(snip)

John Yang:

But in the country's earliest years, abortion was not against the law.

Michele Goodwin, Author, "Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood": Indigenous people had been performing all manner of health care, abortions, helping people carry pregnancies to terms. The Pilgrims were performing abortions. Michele Goodwin is a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Michele Goodwin:

Abortion becomes a controversial issue that is ripe then for legislative debate close to the time of the Civil War. And it's at a time in which males are getting involved in reproduction. Prior to that time, nearly 100 percent of women's reproductive health care had all been done by women and had been done by midwives.

(snip)

John Yang:

Women could find ways to terminate pregnancies in the pages of their newspapers. Ads promoted products with shrewdly disguised names like Dr. Vandenburgh's Female Renovating Pills or services like those Madame Costello provided for ladies "who wish to be treated for obstruction of their monthly periods." In New York, Madame Restell was considered a heroine to her patients, but demonized in the press, labeled "The Abortionist of Fifth Avenue." Her business success spawned copycats in other cities.

In 1847, a group of white men formed the American Medical Association. They pushed for laws to make abortion illegal in an effort to put midwives like Madame Restell out of business. The effort to outlaw abortion was also driven by a growing fear of foreign nonwhite immigration and declining birth rates among white Protestants.

Michele Goodwin:

It was deeply racial, tying into the fact that the nation was soon to be at war and that there were tensions that were already building, with abolitionists saying, these are horrible things that we see taking place in the antebellum South. And so they connected a racist impact to that too, saying that white women needed to use their loins and go north, south, east and west because of the potential browning of America.

(snip)


Jennifer Holland:

In the late '70s, '80s and '90s, you have Republicans acknowledge the power of this voting base. The movement has been incredibly good at developing a constituency for whom no other issue matters. Not any other issue matters as much as this issue.

More..

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exploring-the-complicated-history-of-abortion-in-the-united-states

[BigmanPigman]

1. That reminds me of a lesson

I taught 3rd graders when I was a substitute. They were studying colonial times and I learned that the so called witches who were harassed in New England were actually midwives and the doctors at the time were pissed off that they were taking the doctors' business.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Good job, PBS. I did not know the Puritans practiced...

abortion, or that the AMA was started at least partly to take over the business of midwives.

I did know about white, protestant women not procreating all that much, while blacks were dropping babies like rabbits. And those Irish and Italians with huge families, to say nothing of orthodox Jews, and Mormons. Behind every law or social policy you can find a bit of bigotry. Of course, "be fruitful and multiply" was just asking for it.

Anyway, somehow the "murder of babies" has overtaken the emotions of real murders.

[enough]

4. Thanks for posting this. NT

[keithbvadu2]

5. The Pilgrims wanted freedom of religion... but only their religion.

The Pilgrims wanted freedom of religion... but only their religion.

They escaped persecution of Christians to form their own version of it.

Sounds familiar?