Abortion Before Roe

What It Covers

Throughline traces how abortion transformed from a common, legal practice in early America to criminalized nationwide by 1880, driven by male physicians seeking professional legitimacy and racial anxieties about white Protestant birth rates.

Key Questions Answered

• •Medical profession takeover: The American Medical Association, founded in 1847, used abortion criminalization to eliminate midwife competition and establish male doctors' control over childbirth, transforming a millennia-old women's practice into a male-dominated medical specialty requiring licensing.
• •Quickening doctrine shift: Before 1860, abortion was legal until quickening (feeling fetal movement at 4-5 months), when women determined pregnancy status themselves. Horatio Storer introduced the concept that life begins at conception, fundamentally changing legal and moral frameworks nationwide.
• •Racial motivation strategy: Storer's campaign explicitly targeted declining Protestant white birth rates, warning of race suicide as immigrant and freed Black populations grew. He argued white women needed to reproduce rather than pursue education or careers to maintain demographic dominance.
• •Underground abortion epidemic: After criminalization, illegal abortions continued at 200,000 to 1.2 million annually, but outcomes diverged sharply by race and class. Hospitals reported 5-20 women daily with botched abortion complications, with Black women disproportionately suffering from dangerous back-alley procedures.