abortion history essays

A Brief History of Abortion in the U.S.

Abortion wasn’t always a moral, political, and legal tinderbox. What changed?

A bortion laws have never been more contentious in the U.S. Yet for the first century of the country’s existence—and most of human history before that—abortion was a relatively uncontroversial fact of life.

“Abortion has existed for pretty much as long as human beings have existed,” says Joanne Rosen, JD, MA , a senior lecturer in Health Policy and Management who studies the impact of law and policy on access to abortion.

Until the mid-19th century, the U.S. attitude toward abortion was much the same as it had often been elsewhere throughout history: It was a quiet reality, legal until “quickening” (when fetal motion could be felt by the mother). In the eyes of the law, the fetus wasn’t a “separate distinct entity until then,” but rather an extension of the mother, Rosen explains.

What changed?

America’s first anti-abortion movement wasn’t driven primarily by moral or religious concerns like it is today. Instead, abortion’s first major foe in the U.S. was physicians on a mission to regulate medicine.

Until this point, abortion services had been “women’s work.” Most providers were midwives, many of whom made a good living selling abortifacient plants. They relied on methods passed down through generations, from herbal abortifacients and pessaries—a tampon-like device soaked in a solution to induce abortion—to catheter abortions that irritate the womb and force a miscarriage, to a minor surgical procedure called dilation and curettage (D&C), which remains one of the most common methods of terminating an early pregnancy.

The cottage abortion industry caught the attention of the fledgling American Medical Association, which was established in 1847 and, at the time, excluded women and Black people from membership. The AMA was keen to be taken seriously as a gatekeeper of the medical profession, and abortion services made midwives and other irregular practitioners—so-called quacks—an easy target. Their rhetoric was strategic, says Mary Fissell, PhD , the J. Mario Molina professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. “You have to link those midwives to providing abortion as a way of kind of getting them out of business,” Fissell says. “So organized medicine very much takes the anti-abortion position and stays with that for some time.”

Early 19th century and before

Abortion is legal in the U.S. until “quickening”

AMA campaigns to end abortion

At least 40 anti-abortion statutes are enacted in the U.S.

Comstock Act makes it illegal to sell or mail contraceptives or abortifacients

Late 19th century

OB-GYN emerges as a specialty

Griswold v. Connecticut decision finds that the Constitution guarantees a right to privacy, specifically in prescribing contraceptives, paving the way for Roe v. Wade

Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade enshrines abortion as a constitutional right

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey protects a woman's right to have an abortion prior to  fetal viability

Four states pass trigger laws making it a felony to perform, procure, or prescribe an abortion if Roe is ever overturned

Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey overturned; 13 states ban abortion by October 2022

In 1857, the AMA took aim at unregulated abortion providers with a letter-writing campaign pushing state lawmakers to ban the practice. To make their case, they asserted that there was a medical consensus that life begins at conception, rather than at quickening.

The campaign succeeded. At least 40 anti-abortion laws went on the books between 1860 and 1880.

And yet some doctors continued to perform abortions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By then, abortion was illegal in almost all states and territories, but during the Depression era, “doctors could see why women wouldn’t want a child,” and many would perform them anyway, Fissell says. In the 1920s and through the 1930s, many cities had physicians who specialized in abortions, and other doctors would refer patients to them “off book.”

That leniency faded with the end of World War II. “All across America, it’s very much about gender roles, and women are supposed to be in the home, having babies,” Fissell says. This shift in the 1940s and ’50s meant that more doctors were prosecuted for performing abortions, which drove the practice underground and into less skilled hands. In the 1950s and 1960s, up to 1.2 million illegal abortions were performed each year in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute . In 1965, 17% of reported deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth were associated with illegal abortion.

A rubella outbreak from 1963–1965 moved the dial again, back toward more liberal abortion laws. Catching rubella during pregnancy could cause severe birth defects, leading medical authorities to endorse therapeutic abortions . But these safe, legal abortions remained largely the preserve of the privileged. “Women who are well-to-do have always managed to get abortions, almost always without a penalty,” says Fissell. “But God help her if she was a single, Black, working-class woman.”

Women who could afford it brought their cases to court to fight for access to hospital abortions. Other women gained approval for abortions with proof from a physician that carrying the pregnancy would endanger her life or her physical or mental health. These cases set off a wave of abortion reform bills in state legislatures that helped set the stage for Roe v. Wade . By the time Roe was decided in 1973, legal abortions were already available in 17 states—and not just to save a woman’s life.

But raising the issue to the level of the Supreme Court and enshrining abortion rights for all Americans also galvanized opposition to it and mobilized anti-abortion groups. “ Roe was under attack virtually from the moment it was decided,” says Rosen.  

In 1992 another Supreme Court case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey posed the most significant existential threat to Roe . Rosen calls it “the case that launched a thousand abortion regulations,” upholding Roe but giving states far greater scope to regulate abortion prior to fetal viability. However, defining that nebulous milestone a became a flashpoint for debate as medical advancements saw babies survive earlier and earlier outside the womb. Sonograms became routine around the same time, making fetal life easier to grasp and “putting wind in the sails of the ‘pro-life’ movement,” Rosen says. Then in June, the Supreme Court overturned both Roe and Casey .

For many Americans, that meant the return to the conundrum that led Norma McCorvey—a.k.a. Jane Roe—to the Supreme Court in 1971: being poor and pregnant, and seeking an abortion in a state that had banned them in all but the narrowest of circumstances.

The history of abortion in the U.S. suggests the tides will turn again. “We often see periods of toleration followed by periods of repression,” says Fissell. The current moment is unequivocally marked by the latter. What remains to be seen is how long it will last.

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How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives

I’ve never had an abortion. In this, I am like most American women. A frequently quoted statistic from a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, which reports that one in four women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five, may strike you as high, but it means that a large majority of women never need to end a pregnancy. (Indeed, the abortion rate has been declining for decades, although it’s disputed how much of that decrease is due to better birth control, and wider use of it, and how much to restrictions that have made abortions much harder to get.) Now that the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade sometime in the next few years—Alabama has passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri have passed “heartbeat” bills that, in effect, ban abortion later than six weeks of pregnancy, and any of these laws, or similar ones, could prove the catalyst—I wonder if women who have never needed to undergo the procedure, and perhaps believe that they never will, realize the many ways that the legal right to abortion has undergirded their lives.

Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself. Most obviously, it means that a woman has a safe recourse if she becomes pregnant as a result of being raped. (Believe it or not, in some states, the law allows a rapist to sue for custody or visitation rights.) It means that doctors no longer need to deny treatment to pregnant women with certain serious conditions—cancer, heart disease, kidney disease—until after they’ve given birth, by which time their health may have deteriorated irretrievably. And it means that non-Catholic hospitals can treat a woman promptly if she is having a miscarriage. (If she goes to a Catholic hospital, she may have to wait until the embryo or fetus dies. In one hospital, in Ireland, such a delay led to the death of a woman named Savita Halappanavar, who contracted septicemia. Her case spurred a movement to repeal that country’s constitutional amendment banning abortion.)

The legalization of abortion, though, has had broader and more subtle effects than limiting damage in these grave but relatively uncommon scenarios. The revolutionary advances made in the social status of American women during the nineteen-seventies are generally attributed to the availability of oral contraception, which came on the market in 1960. But, according to a 2017 study by the economist Caitlin Knowles Myers, “The Power of Abortion Policy: Re-Examining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control,” published in the Journal of Political Economy , the effects of the Pill were offset by the fact that more teens and women were having sex, and so birth-control failure affected more people. Complicating the conventional wisdom that oral contraception made sex risk-free for all, the Pill was also not easy for many women to get. Restrictive laws in some states barred it for unmarried women and for women under the age of twenty-one. The Roe decision, in 1973, afforded thousands upon thousands of teen-agers a chance to avoid early marriage and motherhood. Myers writes, “Policies governing access to the pill had little if any effect on the average probabilities of marrying and giving birth at a young age. In contrast, policy environments in which abortion was legal and readily accessible by young women are estimated to have caused a 34 percent reduction in first births, a 19 percent reduction in first marriages, and a 63 percent reduction in ‘shotgun marriages’ prior to age 19.”

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm. She could dream bigger dreams. Under the old rules, inculcated from girlhood, if a woman got pregnant at a young age, she married her boyfriend; and, expecting early marriage and kids, she wouldn’t have invested too heavily in her education in any case, and she would have chosen work that she could drop in and out of as family demands required.

In 1970, the average age of first-time American mothers was younger than twenty-two. Today, more women postpone marriage until they are ready for it. (Early marriages are notoriously unstable, so, if you’re glad that the divorce rate is down, you can, in part, thank Roe.) Women can also postpone childbearing until they are prepared for it, which takes some serious doing in a country that lacks paid parental leave and affordable childcare, and where discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is still widespread. For all the hand-wringing about lower birth rates, most women— eighty-six per cent of them —still become mothers. They just do it later, and have fewer children.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields. It was female lawyers, for example, who brought cases that opened up good blue-collar jobs to women. Without more women obtaining law degrees, would men still be shaping all our legislation? Without the large numbers of women who have entered the medical professions, would psychiatrists still be telling women that they suffered from penis envy and were masochistic by nature? Would women still routinely undergo unnecessary hysterectomies? Without increased numbers of women in academia, and without the new field of women’s studies, would children still be taught, as I was, that, a hundred years ago this month, Woodrow Wilson “gave” women the vote? There has been a revolution in every field, and the women in those fields have led it.

It is frequently pointed out that the states passing abortion restrictions and bans are states where women’s status remains particularly low. Take Alabama. According to one study , by almost every index—pay, workforce participation, percentage of single mothers living in poverty, mortality due to conditions such as heart disease and stroke—the state scores among the worst for women. Children don’t fare much better: according to U.S. News rankings , Alabama is the worst state for education. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of infant mortality (only half the counties have even one ob-gyn), and it has refused to expand Medicaid, either through the Affordable Care Act or on its own. Only four women sit in Alabama’s thirty-five-member State Senate, and none of them voted for the ban. Maybe that’s why an amendment to the bill proposed by State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison was voted down. It would have provided prenatal care and medical care for a woman and child in cases where the new law prevents the woman from obtaining an abortion. Interestingly, the law allows in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that often results in the discarding of fertilized eggs. As Clyde Chambliss, the bill’s chief sponsor in the state senate, put it, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” In other words, life only begins at conception if there’s a woman’s body to control.

Indifference to women and children isn’t an oversight. This is why calls for better sex education and wider access to birth control are non-starters, even though they have helped lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which is the cause of abortion. The point isn’t to prevent unwanted pregnancy. (States with strong anti-abortion laws have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country; Alabama is among them.) The point is to roll back modernity for women.

So, if women who have never had an abortion, and don’t expect to, think that the new restrictions and bans won’t affect them, they are wrong. The new laws will fall most heavily on poor women, disproportionately on women of color, who have the highest abortion rates and will be hard-pressed to travel to distant clinics.

But without legal, accessible abortion, the assumptions that have shaped all women’s lives in the past few decades—including that they, not a torn condom or a missed pill or a rapist, will decide what happens to their bodies and their futures—will change. Women and their daughters will have a harder time, and there will be plenty of people who will say that they were foolish to think that it could be otherwise.

• HISTORY & CULTURE

How U.S. abortion laws went from nonexistent to acrimonious

Most scholars say that at the nation's founding ending a pregnancy wasn’t illegal—or even controversial. Here’s a look at the complex early history of abortion in the United States.

There’s no more hot-button issue in the United States than that of abortion. And every time the divisive battle flares up, someone is bound to invoke the historical legacy of abortion in America.

But what is that history? Though interpretations differ, most scholars who have investigated the complex history of abortion argue that terminating a pregnancy wasn’t always illegal—or even controversial. Here’s what they say about the nation’s long, complicated relationship with abortion.

Before abortion law  

In colonial America and the early days of the republic, there were no abortion laws at all. Church officials frowned on the practice, writes Oklahoma University of Law legal historian Carla Spivack in the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice , but they treated the practice as evidence of illicit or premarital sex—not as murder.

Some localities prosecuted cases involving abortions. In 1740s Connecticut, for example, prosecutors tried both a doctor and a Connecticut man for a misdemeanor in connection with the death of Sarah Grosvenor, who had died after a botched abortion. However, the case centered around the men’s role in the woman’s death, not abortion per se, and such prosecutions were rare.

In fact, says Lauren MacIvor Thompson , a historian of women’s rights and public health and an assistant professor at Kennesaw State University, “abortion in the first trimester would have been very, very common.”

That’s in part because of society’s understanding of conception and life.

Many historians agree that in an era long before reliable pregnancy tests, abortion was generally not prosecuted or condemned up to the point of quickening—the point at which a pregnant woman could feel the fetus’ first kicks and movements . At the time quickening might be the only incontrovertible evidence of pregnancy; indeed, one 1841 physician wrote that many women didn’t even calculate their due dates until they had felt the baby kick, which usually takes place during the second trimester, as late as 20 weeks into the pregnancy. That’s when the fetus was generally recognized as a baby or person.

Until the mid-19th century, writes University of Illinois historian Leslie J. Reagan in her book When Abortion Was a Crime, “What we would now identify as an early induced abortion was not called an ‘abortion’ at all. If an early pregnancy ended, it had ‘slipp[ed] away,’ or the menses had been ‘restored.’”

How early abortion worked

At the time, women who did not wish to remain pregnant had plenty of options. Herbs like savin, tansy, and pennyroyal were common in kitchen gardens, and could be concocted and self-administered to, in the parlance of the time, clear “obstructions” or cause menstruation.

“It was really a decision that a woman could choose in private,” MacIvor Thompson says.

A pregnant woman might consult with a midwife, or head to her local drug store for an over-the-counter patent medicine or douching device. If she owned a book like the 1855   Hand-Book of Domestic Medicine , she could have opened it to the section on “emmenagogues,” substances that provoked uterine bleeding. Though the entry did not mention pregnancy or abortion by name, it did reference “promoting the monthly discharge from the uterus.”

Though reasons varied, a lack of reliable contraception, the disgrace of bearing a child outside of marriage, and the dangers of childbirth were the main reasons women terminated their pregnancies. Though birth rates were high—in 1835, the average woman would give birth more than six times during her lifetime—many women wanted to limit the number of times they would have to carry and bear a child. In an era before modern medical procedures, the grave dangers of childbirth were widely understood. In the words of historian Judith Walzer Leavitt, “Women knew that if procreation did not kill them or their babies, it could maim them for life.”

( Women's health concerns are dismissed more, studied less .)

As a result, the deliberation termination of pregnancy was widely practiced, and by some estimates , up to 35 percent of 19th-century pregnancies ended in abortion.

For enslaved women, abortion was more tightly regulated because their children were seen as property. In the Journal of American Studies , historian Liese M. Perrin writes that many slaveholders were paranoid about abortion on their plantations; she documents that at least one slaveholder locked an enslaved woman up and stripped her of privileges because he suspected she had self-induced a miscarriage. Still, bondswomen’s medical care was usually left to Black midwives who practiced folk medicine.   And at least some enslaved women are known to have used abortifacients, chewing cotton roots or ingesting substances like calomel or turpentine.

Middle- and upper-class white women, however, had an advantage when it came to detecting and treating unwanted pregnancies in the 19th century. Their strictly defined roles in society held that the home—and issues of reproductive health—were a woman’s realm.   And so women, not doctors, were the ones who held and passed down knowledge about pregnancy, childbirth, and reproductive control. “It gave them a space to make their own decisions about their reproductive health,” MacIvor Thompson says.

Criminalizing abortion

That would slowly change throughout the century as the first abortion laws slowly made their ways onto the books. Most were focused on unregulated patent medicines and abortions pursued after quickening. The first , codified in Connecticut in 1821, punished any person who provided or took poison or “other noxious and destructive substance” with the intent to cause “the miscarriage of any woman, then being quick with child.”

Patent medicines were a particular concern; they were available without prescriptions, and their producers could manufacture them with whatever ingredients they wished and advertise them however they liked. Many such medicines were abortifacients and were advertised as such—and they were of particular concern to doctors.

As physicians professionalized in the mid-19th century, they increasingly argued that licensed male doctors, not female midwives, should care for women throughout the reproductive cycle. With that, they began to denounce abortion.

Gynecologist Horatio Storer led the charge. In 1857, just a year after joining the barely decade-old American Medical Association, Storer began pushing the group to explore what he called “criminal abortion.”   Storer argued that abortion was immoral and caused “derangement” in women because it interfered with nature. He lobbied for the association to think of abortion not as a medical act, but a grave crime, one that lowered the profession as a whole.

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A power player within the association, he gathered fellow physicians into a crusade called the Physicians Campaign Against Abortion. The doctors’ public stance helped serve as justification for an increasing number of criminal statutes.

For its opponents, abortion was as much a social evil as a moral one. The influx of immigrants, the growth of cities, and the end of slavery prompted nativist fears that white Americans were not having enough babies to stave off the dominance of groups they found undesirable. This prompted physicians like Storer to argue that white women should have babies for the “future destiny of the nation.”

A nation of outlaws

By 1900, writes University of Oregon historian James C. Mohr in his book Abortion in America , “the United States completed its transition from a nation without abortion laws of any sort to a nation where abortion was legally and officially proscribed.” Just 10 years later, every state in the nation had anti-abortion laws—although many of these laws included exceptions for pregnancies that endangered the life of the mother.

With the help of a U.S. postal inspector named Anthony Comstock, it had also become harder to access once-common information on how to end an unwanted pregnancy. The 1873 Comstock Act made it illegal to send “obscene” materials—including information about abortion or contraception—through the mail or across state lines.

“Americans understood that abortion and birth control went hand in hand,” MacIvor Thompson says.

The combination of anti-obscenity laws, criminal statutes, and the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act , which made it unlawful to make, sell, or transport misbranded or “deleterious” drugs or medicines, made it increasingly difficult for women to access safer forms of abortion.

“The legal punishments in place absolutely had a chilling effect,” says MacIvor Thompson. “And yet, just like a hundred years earlier, women still sought them frequently.”

As the 20th century dawned, under-the-table surgical abortions became more common, discreetly practiced by physicians who advertised by word-of-mouth to those who could afford their services. Those who could not used old herbal recipes, drank creative concoctions, douched with substances like Lysol, or attempted to remove the fetuses on their own.

Advocates of the growing birth control movement even used now-illegal abortion to argue for legal contraception. Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger said that she was inspired to make teaching women about contraceptives her career after treating a woman who died from a self-induced abortion—a practice she called a “disgrace to a civilized community.”

( How the first birth control pill was designed .)

It’s still up for debate how frequently women sought abortions in the 20th century—and how often they died from self-induced or botched, “back-alley” abortions. In 1942, the question vexed the Bureau of the Census’ chief statistician, Halbert Dunn, who noted that, despite the lack of accurate reporting, “abortion is evidently still one of the greatest problems to be met in lowering further the maternal mortality rate for the country.”

The modern battle over abortion

By 1967, abortion was a felony in nearly every state, with few provisions for the health of the mother or pregnancies arising from rape.

But all that changed in the 1970s. States across the country had begun to reconsider their laws and loosen their restrictions on abortion, and in 1973, the Supreme Court seemingly settled the question with two landmark rulings— Roe v. Wade and the lesser-known but equally important Doe v. Bolton— that made terminating a pregnancy a legal right nationwide.

( The tumultuous history that led to the landmark   Roe v. Wade ruling. )

The country has debated the merits of those rulings ever since. In June 2022, the Supreme Court made the momentous decision to overturn Roe . Now, generations of women who have never known life before Roe   face yet another shift in the landscape of the nation’s contentious history of abortion.

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A brief history of abortion – from ancient Egyptian herbs to fighting stigma today

PhD Candidate in English Literature, The University of Edinburgh

Disclosure statement

Alisha Palmer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The University of Edinburgh provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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You might be forgiven for thinking of abortion as a particularly modern phenomenon. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that abortion has been a constant feature of social life for thousands of years . The history of abortion is often told as a legal one, yet abortion has continued regardless of, perhaps even in spite of, legal regulation.

The need to regulate fertility before or after sex has existed for as long as pregnancy has. The Ancient Egyptian Papyrus Ebers is often seen as some of the first written evidence of abortion practice.

Dating back to 1600BC, the text describes methods by which “the woman empties out the conceived in the first, second or third time period”, recommending herbs, vaginal douches and suppositories. Similar methods of inducing abortion were recorded , although not recommended, by Hippocrates around the fourth century BC.

Part of the daily life of ancient citizens, abortion also found its way into their art. Publius Ovidius Naso, commonly known as Ovid, was a Roman poet whose collection of works Amores describes the narrator’s emotional turmoil as he watches his lover suffering from a mismanaged abortion:

While she rashly is overthrowing the burden of her pregnant womb, weary Corinna lies in danger of her life. Having attempted so great a danger without telling me. She deserves my anger, but my anger dies with fear.

Ovid’s concern at first is with the risk of losing his love Corinna, not the potential child. Later, he asks the gods to ignore the “destruction” of the child and save Corinna’s life. This reveals some important aspects of historical attitudes towards abortion.

This article is part of Women’s Health Matters , a series about the health and wellbeing of women and girls around the world. From menopause to miscarriage, pleasure to pain the articles in this series will delve into the full spectrum of women’s health issues to provide valuable information, insights and resources for women of all ages.

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While 21st-century abortion debates often revolve around questions of life and personhood, this was not always the case. The Ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, did not necessarily believe that a foetus was alive.

Early thinkers such as St. Augustine (AD354-AD430), for example, distinguished between the embryo “informatus” (unformed) and “formatus” (formed and endowed with a soul). Over time, the most common distinction became drawn at what was known as the “quickening” , which was when the pregnant woman could feel the baby move for the first time. This determined that the foetus was alive (or had a soul).

As a delayed period was often the first sign something was amiss, and a woman may not have considered herself pregnant until much later, a lot of advice on abortion would focus on restoring menstrual irregularities or blockages instead of terminating a potential pregnancy (or foetus).

As a result, much of the abortion advice throughout history does not necessarily mention abortion at all. And it was often down to personal interpretation whether or not an abortion had even taken place.

Indeed, recipes for “abortifacients” (any substance that is used to terminate a pregnancy) could be found in medical texts like those from the German nun Hildegard von Bingen in 1150 and in domestic recipe books with treatments for other common ailments well into the 20th century.

In the west, the quickening distinction gradually went out of fashion over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet women continued to have abortions despite changing beliefs about life and the law. In fact, some sources claimed, they seemed to be more common than ever.

“An epidemic of abortions”

In 1920, Russia became the first state in the world to legalise abortion, and in 1929, famous birth control advocate Marie Stopes lamented that “an epidemic of abortions” was sweeping England. Similar claims from France and the US also indicate a perceived uptick.

These claims accompanied a wave of plays, poems and novels that included abortion. In fact, in 1923, Floyd Dell, the US magazine editor and writer, published a new work of fiction, Janet March , where the main character complains about the number of novels that feature abortions, stating there “were dreadful things enough in novels, but they happened only to poor girls – ignorant and reckless girls”.

But the literature of the early 20th century, with many stories based on women’s real experiences, attests to a wider range of abortions than the stereotypical image of the poor and destitute backstreet operations of the 1900s.

For example, the English novelist, Rosamond Lehmann records a seductive “feminine conspiracy” of aborting women waiting with “tact, sympathy, pills and hot-water bottles”, in her 1926 novel The Weather in the Streets .

These texts form part of a long tradition of abortion storytelling that is a predecessor to contemporary activism. For example, We Testify is an organisation dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions. And Shout Your Abortion is a social media campaign where people share their abortion experiences online without “sadness, shame or regret”.

Abortion has a long and varied history, but above all these texts – from the Egyptian papyri of 1600BC to the social media posts of today – show that abortion has been and remains central to our history, our lives and even our art.

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

In the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito writes that the nation has had an “unbroken tradition” of criminalizing abortion. But as John Yang reports, the history is much more complicated.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Judy Woodruff:

In the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito writes that the nation has a — quote — "unbroken tradition" of criminalizing abortion.

But, as John Yang reports, the history is actually much more complicated.

For almost a half-century, scenes like this have become nearly routine outside women's health clinics around the country.

Protesters:

Stop murdering your baby. Please, let us help you.

Roe v. Wade has got to go, hey, hey, ho, ho!

In the nation's capital, supporters on each side of the abortion divide made their voices heard.

Pro-family! Pro-choice!

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.

Midwives who helped deliver babies also helped women terminate pregnancies.

Jennifer Holland is a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma.

Jennifer Holland, University of Oklahoma: And in English common law, abortions were illegal before something called quickening, which is when woman felt a fetus move, somewhere between the fourth and sixth month of pregnancy.

And all abortions before that were legal. And only after that were they illegal.

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.

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.

Between the end of the Civil War in 1910, abortion was banned in all the states, except in cases where either the life of the mother or the viability of the fetus was at risk. But abortion was still practice in secret.

Late 19th century observers estimated that, each year, there were two million abortions. And, in 1930, one-fifth of recorded maternal deaths were from these unsafe illegal procedures often called back alley abortions. They have been portrayed in popular culture, here in the film "Dirty Dancing," which was set in 1963.

He didn't use no ether, nothing.

Jennifer Grey, Actress:

I thought you said he was a M.D.

The guy had dirty knife and a folding table. I could hear her screaming in the hallway. And I swear to God, Johnny, I tried to get in. I tried.

Attitudes toward abortion began to shift in the 1960s. One example, the highly publicized case of Sherri Chessen Finkbine, the host of a popular children's TV show.

She feared her developing fetus was damaged as a result of taking thalidomide for morning sickness. She went to Sweden for an abortion because it was illegal in the United States. At the time, a Gallup poll showed 52 percent of Americans said she did the right thing.

Jennifer Holland:

In the mid-'60s, you have this reform movement grow up. And clergy were really outspoken in this particular reform movement. And it's this group of clergy from all different denominations, Jewish, Protestant. And they counseled women about abortion, and helped them seek abortions, and not only that, but then the clergy would testify about their actions in the state legislatures. So they were openly breaking the law.

Another group based in Chicago, the Jane Collective, worked underground to help thousands of women obtain abortions between 1969 and 1973.

The push for abortion rights also became more visible, and pressure was on to liberalize abortion laws.

We're here because we were not allowed to testify to this all-male committee who's deciding what should happen to our bodies and our lives.

Hawaii, New York, Alaska and Washington state were the first to legalize abortion access for women in 1970. Then, in January 1973, the Supreme Court announced its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion nationwide.

These are justices that are looking at the American landscape and finding that abortions have not stopped. There are people who are discovering women in motel rooms dying or dead on top of sheets and towels, women being found on kitchen tables having tried to self-manage an abortion because it's been made criminalized.

The Roe v. Wade ruling fueled a movement against abortion. Groups staged marches and sit-ins across the country in protest.

Catholics and evangelicals and also Mormons, they fundamentally disagreed, not only disagreed about theology, but believed they — each of them believed that they had the monopoly on religious truth.

But they really are able to link themselves through abortion politics, and saying that they are linked by something called Judeo-Christian values, which the anti-abortion movement resuscitates as an idea in the '70s to sort of cover this idea that all Christians, of course, oppose abortion, and they always have. And, of course, that was a manufactured idea of this movement, because religious people had been very openly supporting abortion, and very recently.

And they knew that wasn't true. 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.

In those same decades, some took their beliefs to an extreme, using violence, including bombings, arsons, and even murders of abortion providers.

That is a real threat that continues to exist, not on the scale that it was, though, in the 1980s.

This is now a political movement, and not just something that is simply in the streets. There is a kind of political movement that has taken, that has galvanized, picked up steam, and been able to win victories both at the state legislative level and also in American courts.

I think both Donald Trump and these very fervent state legislatures — legislators who believe very deeply on this issue are really a product of the power of this movement.

It's an issue that's become one of the most divisive of the day.

Outside the Supreme Court, protests continue, as the country awaits the court's final decision.

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Abortion rights: history offers a blueprint for how pro-choice campaigners might usefully respond

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In October 1971, the New York Times reported a decline in maternal death rate. 1 Just 15 months earlier, the state had liberalised its abortion law. David Harris, New York’s deputy commissioner of health, speaking to the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, attributed the decline—by more than half—to the replacement of criminal abortions with safe, legal ones. Previously, abortion had been the single leading cause of maternity related deaths, accounting for around a third. A doctor in the audience who said he was from a state “where the abortion law is still archaic,” thanked New York for its “remarkable job” and expressed his gratitude that there was a place he could send his patients and know they would receive “safe, excellent care.” Harris urged other states to follow the example set by New York and liberalise their abortion laws.

Just two years later, in 1973, the US Supreme Court intervened. In the landmark decision, Roe v. Wade, the Court ruled that the constitution protected a woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion, and in doing so, struck down the “archaic” abortion laws that still existed in many states.

As surely everyone knows by now, Roe v. Wade was repealed on 24 June 2022, setting off a wave of fear, uncertainty, rage, and apprehension among those committed to the right to choose. Thirteen states with “trigger bans,” designed to take effect automatically if the ruling was ever struck down, are due to prohibit abortion within 30 days. 2 At least eight states banned the procedure the day the ruling was released. Several others are expected to act, with lawmakers moving to reactivate their dormant legislation. But as the 1971 New York Times article indicates, banning abortion only bans safe abortion.

In November 1955, Jacqueline Smith found out she was about six weeks pregnant. Historian Gillian Frank describes what happened next. 3 Unmarried and anxious about the social consequences for mothers and babies born out of wedlock, Jacqueline and her boyfriend Daniel started looking for methods to end the pregnancy. On the 24 December 1955, Daniel paid a hospital attendant, $50 to perform an illegal abortion in the living room of the boyfriend’s Manhattan apartment. Just a few hours later, Jacqueline was dead. Before abortion was legalised in Great Britain in 1967, the situation on this side of the Atlantic was similar.

As the New York Times article suggests, these names were just some of thousands of women who lost their lives to backstreet abortions or forced birth, and of many more who had their lives irreparably altered by being made to carry babies to term that they were not able to care for or that they simply did not want. But if history foreshadows a terrifying history for women in America, it also offers a blueprint for how pro-choice campaigners might usefully respond.

Roe v. Wade was a landmark legal decision, but it came only after decades of grassroots feminist activism. In early 1960s California, radical activist Pat Maginnis taught women how to fake the symptoms that would get them a “therapeutic abortion” (then the only legal kind). 4 She founded a group called the Society for Humane Abortion that demanded the repeal of abortion laws and ran an underground network focused on helping women obtain safe abortions, compiling lists of abortion providers outside the US, and providing women with tips on how to evade suspicion at the Mexican border. While some doctors and others were advocating reformed abortion laws in the first half of the twentieth century, it was feminists like Maginnis who were the first to publicly insist that abortion should be completely decriminalised. In 1969, the radical feminist group Redstockings organised an “abortion speakout” in New York City, where women talked about their experiences with illegal terminations. This history shows that women have always been at the forefront of pro-choice activism, and sadly will have to be once again.

But abortion rights also need to be protected closer to home. While abortion is legal in Northern Ireland, millions of women, girls, and people remain without access and must travel to England to receive appropriate reproductive care. Similarly, due to the legacy of nineteenth-century legislation, abortion remains a criminal offence in England—and doctors must lend their substantial social and political capital to the campaign to overturn the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. 5

The world is radically different to how it was in the 1960s. But two things remain constant. Reproductive rights are fundamental to women’s health, safety, and autonomy. And if access to abortion is to be reinstated or expanded in both the United Kingdom and the United States, then healthcare professionals need to be led by, and work in collaboration with, feminist activists.

Competing interests: AA-F’s research is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Provenance and peer review: commissioned, not peer reviewed.

• ↵ The New York Times. Decline in Maternal Death Rate Linked to Liberalized Abortion. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/10/13/archives/decline-in-maternal-death-rate-linked-to-liberalized-abortion.html?searchResultPosition=1
• ↵ NPR. 'Trigger laws' have been taking effect now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1107531644/trigger-laws-have-been-taking-effect-now-that-roe-v-wade-has-been-overturned
• ↵ Slate. The Death of Jacqueline Smith. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/12/jacqueline-smiths-1955-death-and-the-lessons-we-havent-yet-learned-from-it.html
• ↵ NPR. Inside Pat Maginnis' radical (and underground) tactics on abortion rights in the '60s. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/29/1047068724/pat-was-an-early-radical-abortion-rights-activist-her-positions-are-now-common
• ↵ Freeman H. The Guardian. Abortion should be a medical matter, not a criminal one. The law needs to change. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/01/uk-abortion-criminal-offence-24-week-time-limit

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Roe v. Wade

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 21, 2023 | Original: March 27, 2018

Roe v. Wade was a landmark legal decision issued on January 22, 1973, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas statute banning abortion, effectively legalizing the procedure across the United States. The court held that a woman’s right to an abortion was implicit in the right to privacy protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution . Prior to Roe v. Wade , abortion had been illegal throughout much of the country since the late 19th century. Since the 1973 ruling, many states imposed restrictions on abortion rights. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade  on June 24, 2022, holding that there was no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion.

Abortion Before Roe v. Wade

Until the late 19th century, abortion was legal in the United States before “quickening,” the point at which a woman could first feel movements of the fetus, typically around the fourth month of pregnancy.

Some of the early regulations related to abortion were enacted in the 1820s and 1830s and dealt with the sale of dangerous drugs that women used to induce abortions. Despite these regulations and the fact that the drugs sometimes proved fatal to women, they continued to be advertised and sold.

In the late 1850s, the newly established American Medical Association began calling for the criminalization of abortion, partly in an effort to eliminate doctors’ competitors such as midwives and homeopaths.

Additionally, some nativists, alarmed by the country’s growing population of immigrants, were anti-abortion because they feared declining birth rates among white, American-born, Protestant women.

In 1869, the Catholic Church banned abortion at any stage of pregnancy, while in 1873, Congress passed the Comstock law, which made it illegal to distribute contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs through the U.S. mail. By the 1880s, abortion was outlawed across most of the country.

During the 1960s, during the women’s rights movement, court cases involving contraceptives laid the groundwork for Roe v. Wade .

In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law banning the distribution of birth control to married couples, ruling that the law violated their implied right to privacy under the U.S. Constitution . And in 1972, the Supreme Court struck down a law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried adults.

Meanwhile, in 1970, Hawaii became the first state to legalize abortion, although the law only applied to the state’s residents. That same year, New York legalized abortion, with no residency requirement. By the time of Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion was also legally available in Alaska and Washington .

In 1969, Norma McCorvey, a Texas woman in her early 20s, sought to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. McCorvey, who had grown up in difficult, impoverished circumstances, previously had given birth twice and given up both children for adoption. At the time of McCorvey’s pregnancy in 1969 abortion was legal in Texas—but only for the purpose of saving a woman’s life.

While American women with the financial means could obtain abortions by traveling to other countries where the procedure was safe and legal, or pay a large fee to a U.S. doctor willing to secretly perform an abortion, those options were out of reach to McCorvey and many other women.

As a result, some women resorted to illegal, dangerous, “back-alley” abortions or self-induced abortions. In the 1950s and 1960s, the estimated number of illegal abortions in the United States ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

After trying unsuccessfully to get an illegal abortion, McCorvey was referred to Texas attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, who were interested in challenging anti-abortion laws.

In court documents, McCorvey became known as “Jane Roe.”

In 1970, the attorneys filed a lawsuit on behalf of McCorvey and all the other women “who were or might become pregnant and want to consider all options,” against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, where McCorvey lived.

Earlier, in 1964, Wade was in the national spotlight when he prosecuted Jack Ruby , who killed Lee Harvey Oswald , the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy .

Supreme Court Ruling

In June 1970, a Texas district court ruled that the state’s abortion ban was illegal because it violated a constitutional right to privacy. Afterward, Wade declared he’d continue to prosecute doctors who performed abortions.

The case eventually was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, McCovey gave birth and put the child up for adoption.

On Jan 22, 1973, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, struck down the Texas law banning abortion, effectively legalizing the procedure nationwide. In a majority opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun , the court declared that a woman’s right to an abortion was implicit in the right to privacy protected by the 14th Amendment .

The court divided pregnancy into three trimesters, and declared that the choice to end a pregnancy in the first trimester was solely up to the woman. In the second trimester, the government could regulate abortion, although not ban it, in order to protect the mother’s health.

In the third trimester, the state could prohibit abortion to protect a fetus that could survive on its own outside the womb, except when a woman’s health was in danger.

5 Historic Supreme Court Rulings Based on the 14th Amendment

The 14th Amendment's guarantee to "due process" provided a basis for these five Supreme Court rulings that have impacted Americans' lives.

Reproductive Rights in the US: Timeline

Since the early 1800s, U.S. federal and state governments have taken steps both securing and limiting access to contraception and abortion.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Landmark Opinions on Women’s Rights

The Supreme Court Justice was the second woman to hold the role—and battled gender discrimination since the 1970s.

Legacy of Roe v. Wade

Norma McCorvey maintained a low profile following the court’s decision, but in the 1980s she was active in the abortion rights movement.

However, in the mid-1990s, after becoming friends with the head of an anti-abortion group and converting to Catholicism, she turned into a vocal opponent of the procedure.

Since Roe v. Wade , many states imposed restrictions that weaken abortion rights, and Americans remain divided over support for a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

In 1992, litigation against Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act reached the Supreme Court in a case called Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey . The court upheld the central ruling in Roe v. Wade but allowed states to pass more abortion restrictions as long as they did not pose an “undue burden."

Roe v. Wade Overturned

In 2022, the nation's highest court deliberated on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , which regarded the constitutionality of a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Lower courts had ruled the law was unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade . Under Roe , states had been prohibited from banning abortions before around 23 weeks—when a fetus is considered able to survive outside a woman's womb.

In its decision , the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of Mississippi's law—and overturned Roe after its nearly 50 years as precedent.

Abortion in American History. The Atlantic . High Court Rules Abortion Legal in First 3 Months. The New York Times . Norma McCorvey. The Washington Post . Sarah Weddington. Time . When Abortion Was a Crime , Leslie J. Reagan. University of California Press .

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UNRWA: Israel Denying Visas to Aid Groups, “Phasing Out” Humanitarians in Gaza

Vance explains trump’s “concept of a plan” is to essentially dismantle obamacare, israel is carrying out deliberate “starvation campaign” in gaza, says un expert, postal workers plan day of action to fight dejoy’s plan to “modernize” the usps, abortion is as old as pregnancy: 4,000 years of reproductive rights history.

On Roe v. Wade’s 43rd anniversary, a look at abortion history offers perspective on the current era of decreased access.

Abortion has always existed. The earliest written record of abortion is more than 4,000 years old. Pregnancy has always been accompanied by the seeking and sharing of methods for ending pregnancy.

The United States’ history with abortion is complicated and currently in flux. Up until 1821, abortion simply existed and, like pregnancy and other “woman-related” business, was entrusted to midwives and other caregivers. The transition to outright criminalization of abortion would take more than 50 years; prohibition would last a century.

Because Roe v. Wade – which turns 43 today – decriminalized abortion through a right to privacy framework, states have been allowed to enact some restrictions on later-term abortions since 1973. We are in yet another new era – one of decreased access to safe, legal abortion care, which has sparked a collaborative effort of grassroots activists and large, national organizations to reverse this dangerous trend.

Abortion in Times of Old

Instructions for inducing an abortion appear in the Bible. In Numbers 5:11-31 , God is described as instructing Moses to present “The Test for an Unfaithful Wife” (NIV) – a ritual to be used by priests against women accused by their husbands of unfaithfulness. The ritual involves the drinking of “bitter water,” a potion that will abort any pregnancies that result from “having sexual relations with a man other than your husband.”

Rickie Solinger, historian and author of Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know and What Is Reproductive Justice? , which will be published next year, described the scope of methods used over time to Truthout.

“In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance , John Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the 15th century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility,” Solinger said.

The comprehensive timeline from 4000 Years for Choice , an organization which celebrates the reproductive roots of abortion and contraception through art and education, tracks abortion all the way back to the 3000s BCE, referencing the Royal Archives of China, which holds the earliest written record of an abortion technique.

“Women always have and always will have abortions,” Heather Ault , 4000 Years for Choice founder and graphic designer, told Truthout. “It’s fundamental to human existence, and all human societies around the world have practiced forms of controlling pregnancy, to various degrees of effectiveness with the tools and knowledge they had available at that time, whether it be toxic herbs, early surgical methods or magic and spells.”

Ault’s US timeline picks up in the 1600s when enslaved African women were using the cottonwood plant to abort fetuses in a moment when many pregnancies were the result of rape by slave owners, and colonial women used “the savin from the juniper bush, pennyroyal, tansy, ergot, and seneca snakeroot to abort pregnancies.” Until the early 1800s, abortion was legal through common law before “ quickening ,” when the baby’s first detectable motion in the womb indicated it was alive (approximately the fourth month). After quickening, inducing a miscarriage was a common law misdemeanor.

In 1821, however, Connecticut passed the country’s first abortion restriction to make using “poison” after quickening a crime punishable by life in prison. (The sentence would later be reduced to 10 years.) Several states followed suit and by the end of the 19th century, every state except Kentucky – which waited until 1910 – had passed anti-abortion legislation. The American Medical Association, which formed in 1857 and immediately set out to make all abortion illegal , provided legitimacy to the incremental infringement on bodily autonomy.

Then, the politician and “morality” advocate Anthony Comstock began his crusade against birth control, sex workers and eventually abortion. In 1873, the “Comstock Law” outlawed contraception and abortion with limited exceptions for health. With the passage of this law, women lost what had been their common law right.

“Anthony Comstock was the main anti-choice person who, in the late 1800s, starting burning books and made it illegal for anything to be sent through the mail having to do with sexuality,” Ault said. “He later jailed Margaret Sanger [for defying the contraception prohibition] and was on her case until he died.”

By the late 1920s, some 15,000 women a year died from abortions because safe, legal procedures were nearly impossible for most to obtain. According to 4000 Years for Choice, dangerous self-induction methods included using knitting needles, crochet hooks, hairpins, scissors and buttonhooks. With the death toll rising, physicians in the 1930s began providing abortion care through underground clinics and in subsequent decades individuals and doctors banded together to work around and protest the prohibition.

According to David Grimes , former chief of the Abortion Surveillance Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the 1950s, approximately 200,000 to 1.2 million illegal, unsafe abortions were performed per year.

The horror stories of the pre- Roe back-alley days are well documented. Brave people have increasingly been telling their stories as they’ve watched the flurry of anti-abortion laws passing in states across the country bring back flashes of the bad old days. Their words bring the mortality statistics of the abortion prohibition days into stark focus, but our elected officials have largely brushed them aside.

Abortion After Roe v. Wade

Finally, after 100 years without access to safe, legal abortion in the United States, Dallas area resident Norma L. McCorvey’s (“Jane Roe”) case claiming a Texas law criminalizing most abortions violated her constitutional rights arrived at the Supreme Court . On January 22, 1973, the court’s 7-2 decision found that the Texas law violated four separate constitutional amendments and declared an individual’s “zone of privacy” extended to their doctor’s office, thus lifting the ban on abortion. Justice Harry Blackmun’s decision stated that more narrow state laws could be constitutional after the point of viability for the fetus; this, unfortunately, has allowed the onslaught of state-level restrictions that has intensified since 2011.

The United Nations may have declared that “unnecessary restrictions on abortion should be removed and governments should provide access to safe abortion services,” but US legislators seem not to have gotten the message. The Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health and rights research and education group, reports that in just the past four years, 231 abortion restrictions have been enacted at the state level. The Population Institute ’s latest “ 50 State Report Card ” grades the US overall at a D+ in overall reproductive rights and health – a slip from 2014’s C rating. Guttmacher now ranks 27 states as either “hostile” or “extremely hostile” to abortion.

While 17 states have introduced 95 measures designed to expand access to abortion – more positive measures than in any year since 1990 – these laws aren’t passing at a rate that rivals the effectiveness of the anti-abortion movement and its legislators. As Heather D. Boonstra, Guttmacher Institute’s director of public policy, wrote at The Hill , “for many women in the United States, safe and legal abortion has long been out of reach.”

This year, reproductive rights and justice groups as well as grassroots activists are pushing for new legislation – like Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-California) Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance Act – to “ Reclaim Roe ” and begin reversing the trend of restrictions that disproportionately affect the poor and communities of color.

Reclaiming Roe

The real test for whether Roe is reclaimable comes this March when the Supreme Court hears its first abortion case in eight years: Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole , a case concerning a Texas law designed to close down more than 75 percent of clinics that provide abortion services in the state, which was made famous by the filibuster in the Texas Capitol in 2013. The law has been described by many opponents as a de facto abortion ban.

With a historic set of 45 amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, including expert legal, legislative and medical opinions as well as the abortion stories of a wide variety of people – attorneys, legislators, stay-at-home parents, immigrants, undocumented people and youth – the justices will have all the data ahead of arguments on March 2 . This decision will determine whether reducing abortion clinic numbers into single digits for a state the size of Texas constitutes an “undue burden,” and will possibly set new precedent for the country.

“The Supreme Court has never wavered in affirming that every woman has a right to safely and legally end a pregnancy in the US – and this extreme abortion ban was a direct affront to that right,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “We now look to the justices to ensure Texas women are not robbed of their health, dignity and rights under false pretenses and strike down the state’s deceptive clinic shutdown law currently under review.”

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From Commonplace to Controversial: The Different Histories of Abortion in Europe and the United States

• Anna M. Peterson

Planned Parenthood supporters demonstrate in Columbus, Ohio, 2012. Over the last hundred years abortion practices and policies have gone in very different directions in Western Europe and the United States, where abortion rights are far more politically polarizing.

As the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade , the US Supreme Court case legalizing abortion, approaches, many Americans assume that legalized abortion is only as old as that ruling. In fact, as Anna Peterson discusses this month, abortion had only been made illegal at the turn of the 20th century. The different histories of abortion in Europe and the United States reveal much about the current state of American debates—so prominent in the 2012 elections campaigns—over abortion and women’s health.

*Update: for our podcast, we caught up with Anna Peterson during her research in Oslo, Norway.

For more from Origins on women's history, please read Women’s Rights in Afghanistan ; Women's Politics in Zimbabwe ; The Real Marriage Revolution ; Child Kidnapping in America ; and Abortion in Canada (PDF File) .

Representative Todd Akin (R-Missouri) caused a political firestorm this August when he told a television reporter that he opposes abortion in all circumstances because "legitimate rape" rarely leads to pregnancy. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney quickly distanced his own pro-life views from Akin's, and President Barack Obama reiterated his commitment to not make "health care decisions on behalf of women."

Politicians frequently use their stances on abortion to elicit electoral support, and this election year is no different. Abortion is again a major point of divisive debate in presidential and congressional races. And state legislative efforts to restrict abortion access are currently under way in twelve states.

The 2012 Republican Party platform calls for a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortions but makes no explicit mention of whether exceptions would be made for cases of rape and incest. Romney has indicated in several interviews that he supports the repeal of Roe v. Wade .

Across the Atlantic, the abortion issue seldom garners such rapt attention. As members of national health insurance plans, most Western European women enjoy access to elective abortion services—also called abortion on demand. While there are significant regional differences in abortion policies and political discourse, abortion is rarely a point of contention during elections.

Abortion practices, debates, and laws initially developed quite similarly in Europe and the U.S., but at the turn of the twentieth century, cultural attitudes began to diverge. While Europeans continued to believe that abortion was a desperate act of unfortunate women, some powerful Americans began to argue that abortion was an immoral act of sinful women. These divergent perceptions of abortion and the women who have them still affect abortion debates and legislation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Historically, abortion policy has revolved around three main players: government officials, women, and medical practitioners.

The historical record also shows that, for thousands of years, women have limited the number of the children they bore through pregnancy prevention, abortion, and infanticide. Abortion was only recently outlawed, and then only for a period of roughly 100 years. When women did not have legal access to abortion services they still found ways (albeit often unsafe ways) to end unwanted pregnancies.

Abortion at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

For most of Western history, aborting an early pregnancy was considered a private matter controlled by women and was not a crime.

At the turn of the nineteenth century most people in Western Europe and the United States did not believe human life was present until a pregnant woman felt the first fetal movements, a phenomenon referred to as quickening .

Before quickening, women thought about pregnancy in terms of a lack of something (menstruation) rather than the presence of something (a fetus). In an effort to restore their monthly periods, they took herbal abortifacients such as savin, pennyroyal, and ergot, which they often found in their own gardens.

They did not consider such practices abortion. In fact, the word abortion was confined to miscarriages that occurred after quickening. Medical doctors had trouble even verifying a pregnancy until the woman reported that quickening had occurred.

Religious authorities such as the Roman Catholic Church also supported the idea that the soul was not present until a later stage of pregnancy. Although not official church doctrine, this belief was based on St. Augustine's fifth-century interpretation of Aristotle, that the soul enters the body only after the body is fully formed—some 40 days after conception for males and 80 days for females.

Laws reflected this distinction between the quick and the nonquick fetus. In the United States and England, abortion was legal in the early 1800s as long as it was performed prior to quickening. During later stages of pregnancy, abortion was a crime, but distinct from other forms of murder and punished less harshly.

It was very difficult to prove that a woman accused of abortion had ever felt the fetus move. Even in infanticide cases, the court often had to rely on the accused woman's testimony to know whether the child had died in utero or had been born full-term and alive.

When Margaret Rauch was put on trial in Pennsylvania in 1772 for a suspected infanticide, she testified that the baby "used to move before, but did not move after [she fell during the pregnancy]." Rauch was acquitted.

At this time, the pregnant woman had significant power in defining pregnancy and the law was based on her bodily experience.

By the mid-1800s women from all walks of life aborted pregnancies, and abortion services had grown more widely available. As the professionalization and commercialization of medicine began, more abortion options became available to the women who could afford to pay for them.

Poor women—especially unmarried ones—continued to use herbs to abort unwanted pregnancies, and could purchase abortifacients from pharmacists through the mail. If those drugs failed they could go to the growing number of practices that used medical instruments to induce abortions. Costing anywhere between $5 and $500, most women who could pay skilled professionals for such services were married members of the middle and upper classes.

The Road to Criminalization

In the late nineteenth century, American and European doctors, social reformers, clergy members, and politicians made abortion into a social, political, and religious issue. Women's experiences of quickening were discredited as unscientific and medical doctors became the recognized experts on pregnancy and fetal development.

Quickening lost credibility as a valid indication of fetal life when doctors lobbied state governments to change laws to reflect their new way of thinking. By 1900, Western European countries and the United States had outlawed abortion during all stages of pregnancy.

The U.S. and England, where quickening had carried the most legal weight, criminalized abortion during all stages of pregnancy by the late 1880s. British criminalization began with Lord Ellenborough's act of 1803 and was fully realized when Parliament passed the Offenses Against the Person Act in 1861.

Abortion was outlawed state-by-state in the U.S. between 1860 and 1880. Abortion was also considered a criminal act in most of Western Europe, with many of the laws originating in the 1810 Napoleonic legal code.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, social scientists began to publish statistics comparing birth rates among nations. As nationalism and imperialism intensified tensions between European countries, these numbers took on new significance. Statesmen feared that if women chose to have fewer children then this would decrease their nation's ability to compete in modernized warfare.

Anxiety racked French politicians when they learned France's birth rate had fallen nearly a third between 1870 and 1914, while its neighbor (and recent and future enemy) Germany's had barely changed at all. The idea that women needed to give birth to as many children as possible spread contagiously.

Ludwig Quessel captured the dire essence of this worry when he said: "A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of a birth-strike." In this climate, women's control of their fertility represented a threat to national interests.

Concerns arose in Europe and the U.S. not only over women's refusal to bear more children, but over which women were limiting their family size. The visible use of abortion by white, middle-class women seemed to threaten the status of their male counterparts and "white" positions of power.

As Theodore Roosevelt put it in 1894, women of "good stock" who refused to have children were "race criminals."

The Criminalization of Abortion

Increased scrutiny of pregnancy and childbirth coincided with a push by medical doctors to increase their professional influence. Because of the variety of abortion methods available to women, trained physicians had little control over this area of what they considered medical science.

In the United States, the newly created American Medical Association (AMA) initiated an antiabortion campaign in 1857 as part of its efforts to professionalize and to restrict competition from homeopaths and midwives. They lobbied for the criminalization of abortion, capitalizing on fears that not enough white, native-born women were having children.

Doctors claimed there was little difference between a quick and a nonquick fetus and that earlier and later stages of pregnancy were not distinct. In doing so, they redefined the meaning of abortion to include early stages of pregnancy.

AMA doctors discredited women's experiences of quickening as unscientific and emotional. Noted AMA physician and antiabortion advocate Dr. Horatio Storer quipped in his 1868 book Why Not?: "Many women never quicken at all, though their children are born living."

American doctors joined forces with religious authorities to pass antiabortion laws. While doctors spearheaded the movement to discredit quickening and criminalize abortion, their ideas about fetal development also led to important changes in Roman Catholic Church doctrine.

Pope Pius IX declared in 1869 that an embryo was a human being with a soul from the time of conception. This declaration challenged existing beliefs that an ensouled, animated fetus was different from an inanimate one. Pius also stated that abortions performed at any stage of pregnancy warranted excommunication. In 1895, a papal decree condemned therapeutic (life-saving) abortions as well.

These changes inspired many Catholics to support the AMA's antiabortion campaign. Protestant churches, with their doctrinal emphasis on individual reason and responsibility, remained more open to abortion and more accepting of therapeutic abortion.

American and most European abortion laws included an exemption allowing doctors to perform abortions if a woman's life was in danger. These exemptions further solidified the alliance between the state and doctors, however, by allowing doctors to adjudicate the legality of abortions. Doctors took the lead in having abortion criminalized, and the state, in turn, recognized them as the only legitimate providers of abortion services.

By 1900, then, abortion had been culturally and politically redefined as the taking of a human life—an immoral and illegal act. The shift in attitudes toward pregnancy and abortion that had been championed by doctors and church officials led politicians in most Western countries to enact antiabortion legislation.

What had once been considered a private matter minimally legislated by the state had become a public concern worthy of punishment. Women's bodily experiences were viewed with distrust and their efforts to control their fertility often deemed criminal.

"When Abortion was a Crime"

Abortion was illegal in Western Europe and the United States for much of the twentieth century. Women did not, however, stop having abortions.

Though the legal status of abortion had changed dramatically, the general public in both the United States and Europe still widely accepted the practice. Most women continued to see abortion as an acceptable method of ridding their bodies of unwanted pregnancies and restoring their menstrual cycles. They did not feel a moral obligation to carry the pregnancy to term until they felt the fetus move

Many medical practitioners actually continued to perform illegal abortions, often charging substantial amounts of money. Doctors, midwives, and others offered abortion services in walk-up offices, clinics, and even hospitals.

Women quietly informed one another who could be counted on to help them. While midwives and homeopaths faced the greatest risk of imprisonment for performing abortions, doctors were largely able to avoid prosecution by claiming they were merely performing the therapeutic abortions allowed by law.

Abortion businesses boomed, mainly because most women stopped using herbs to induce abortions and increasingly sought surgical abortions to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

Medical abortions, especially those performed with surgical tools, had garnered a reputation as a more effective and safer means of inducing miscarriage. Practitioners most often used dilation and curettage—a procedure in which a woman's cervix is dilated and a spoon-shaped instrument is inserted into the uterus to scrape out the fetal and placental tissue—to terminate pregnancies. As a result, abortion in the twentieth century ceased to be a secret kept among women and became a publicly available service.

In the United States, the AMA reacted to the continued widespread acceptance, and use, of abortion in the early twentieth century with a renewal of their antiabortion campaign. Prominent AMA doctors were appalled that women still believed that having an abortion prior to quickening was a perfectly acceptable and moral act.

Dr. Storer's hope in 1868 that "Women in every rank and condition of life may be made sensible of the value of the fætus, and of the high responsibility which rests upon its parents" had not been fulfilled. They blamed a lack of enforcement for the persistence of high rates of illegal abortion.

In order to convince the general public that abortion was wrong, some American doctors, along with moral crusaders like Anthony Comstock, waged a cultural campaign against abortion. The Comstock Act outlawed the circulation of "obscene" materials including contraceptives and information about contraceptives or abortion. Many birth control advocates, including Margaret Sanger, were prosecuted under the law for sending such materials through the mail.

The Parting of Ways

In the late nineteenth century, American attitudes toward abortion began to diverge from those in Europe. People in both Europe and the U.S. had long expressed sympathy for women who had abortions and many believed abortions helped unfortunate women in difficult situations.

American antiabortionists instead put forth an image of women who procured abortions as frivolous and promiscuous.

The AMA argued that abortion was a moral issue and insisted it was doctors' Christian duty to educate others about the immorality of abortion. Chairman of the AMA Section on Obstetrics, J. Milton Duff, described abortion in 1893 as "a pernicious crime against God and society." In 1915, Chicago circuit court Judge John P. McGoorty echoed these views, "A woman who would destroy life in that manner is not fit for decent society."

The idea that only disreputable women sought abortions gained less traction in Europe, where the Social Democratic Party (SDP) was gaining popular support.

The growth of a party focused on socialist goals lent credibility to the notion that women who had abortions were desperate and destitute. So when it became evident that criminalization had not stopped abortion, European Social Democrats and women's rights activists argued that the best way to solve the abortion problem was to resolve socioeconomic issues.

Meanwhile, the global economic crisis of the 1930s led more married women than ever before to demand (illegal) abortion services.

The Seeds of Abortion Law Reform

The Great Depression led to a sharp increase in both legal and illegal abortion rates, further widening the divide between European and American attitudes.

Some doctors stretched their definitions of therapeutic abortion to include social criteria, but many did not. Desperation led many women to accept unsafe abortion methods.

Dr. Frederick J. Taussig and the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research estimated that in the United States alone 17,000 women died each year from abortion-related complications during the 1930s. These deaths became visible evidence of the consequences of illegal abortions and created an opportunity for public debate on abortion reform.

European political efforts to legalize abortion in the 1930s drew upon the already prevailing idea that women were driven to abortion by poverty and desperation. Birth control advocates often led these reform movements and used anecdotal evidence to emphasize women's desperation.

Ordinary women like Astrid Knudsen, a poor Norwegian woman, beseeched birth control advocates to help her end her pregnancy as "our situation is such that we cannot manage the two children we already have … and to bring more children into this horrible world [would be] impossible."

As the SDP achieved more political success in this period, especially in Northwestern Europe, governments were increasingly persuaded by these heart-wrenching stories. Many European countries subsequently expanded the therapeutic conditions for legal abortions, but abortions performed at a woman's request remained illegal.

In the United States, birth control became more widely accepted for married couples in the 1930s, but no popular movement to reform abortion laws emerged in the interwar years due in part to American fears of Soviet communism. While the Soviets had been the first in the world to legalize abortion on demand in 1920, Stalin recriminalized abortion in 1936 to stimulate population growth.

Still, Americans continued to link abortion with Soviet socialism throughout the 1930s, hindering public discussion of decriminalization.

So, while the dramatic increase in abortion-related deaths during the 1930s had inspired decriminalization debates in Europe, Americans responded by intensifying enforcement. Police and prosecutors began to arrest and prosecute abortion providers.

The police also stepped up their interrogations of hospitalized women who were dying from abortion-related complications, sometimes under threat of withholding access to medical treatment.

As a result, hospitals defensively set up committees to legitimate medical reasons for abortions. These efforts served to heighten the focus on the criminality of abortion and the women who sought abortion services. This, coupled with the lack of an abortion reform movement, served to keep abortion a closeted issue in the U.S.

The (Re)Legalization of Abortion

The severe repression of abortion in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s created a discriminatory system with deadly results. Women and physicians who had seen the results of "back alley" abortions grew increasingly frustrated.

Abortion had always carried a high risk. Over time, many women had died from home remedies like ingesting large doses of abortifacients, being kicked in the abdomen, throwing oneself down a flight of stairs, or having unskilled surgical procedures. But by the 1930s, deaths and complications from abortions sought outside the home rendered these dangers public and seemingly epidemic.

When large numbers of women were hospitalized with abortion-related complications, people couldn't help but witness the tragic results of criminalization.

As a result, women and some reform-minded physicians formed abortion reform movements in the 1950s and 1960s that would eventually succeed in legalizing abortion in the United States and stimulate the repeal of abortion laws around the world.

Medical professionals joined forces with lawyers to expand the conditions under which women could legally procure abortions. A few highly publicized abortion cases in the 1960s captured public attention.

When Sherri Finkbine found out her sleeping pills contained thalidomide—a drug that causes birth defects—she scheduled an abortion at an Arizona hospital. After she went public with her story to warn other women about the dangers of thalidomide, the hospital refused to treat her because they were worried about bad publicity. She eventually had to go to Sweden to obtain an abortion.

The public focus on women's abortion needs in the 1960s went hand-in-hand with the emergence of the second-wave feminist movement. Feminists in Europe and the United States began to mobilize around the abortion issue. In Europe, where reform movements had been present since the 1930s, feminists shifted the focus from reform to repeal.

American and European feminists wanted women to be able to freely choose whether to have an abortion instead of having to rely on a doctor's interpretation of legitimate reasons. To these feminists the criminal status of abortion represented men's subordination of women and the medical establishment's control of women's bodies. They claimed that the repeal of all antiabortion laws was a cornerstone of women's liberation.

Feminists in the U.S. and Europe employed different strategies that had the most resonance with existing cultural beliefs.

American feminists often based their arguments on abstract principles of individual rights. American feminists never directly challenged the belief that women obtained abortions frivolously. Instead they emphasized women's right to control their bodies without state interference.

Many European feminists framed their demands for legalized abortion in terms of public health and humanitarianism. They reasoned that until the state ensured that all women could bear children without suffering economic or social consequences, women should have access to legal abortion services.

They drew upon the established belief that most women only had abortions out of legitimate need. Feminists argued that these self-identified welfare states were obliged to protect women, especially poor women, from the burdens of unwanted pregnancy.

The (re)legalization of abortion that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s was informed by the ideas put forward by feminists and physicians.

In 1967, Britain significantly expanded the conditions for legal abortion. The Abortion Act stated that abortions were legal as long as two medical professionals agreed that pregnancy endangered the life, mental or physical health of the woman or her children, and in cases of fetal deformity and handicap. While this law did not completely decriminalize abortion it represented an important step toward the legalization of abortion in Western Europe and the United States.

The American legalization of abortion stemmed from two Supreme Court cases. In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton that the nineteenth-century antiabortion laws were unconstitutional violations of women's rights and doctors' rights.

The Roe v. Wade decision found that "a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy" was constitutionally protected under the right to privacy. This ruling also found that medical doctors had the right to treat patients without undue interference.

In Doe v. Bolton the Supreme Court declared that hospital committees set up to legitimate therapeutic abortions were unconstitutional. They determined that these restrictions on abortion infringed on a woman's right to health care and a physician's right to practice medicine.

Neither Roe v. Wade nor Doe v. Bolton gave women the unconditional right to abort. Instead these decisions built on a fairly new idea that fetal development could be divided into trimesters. A woman's constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy was only protected during the first trimester. This legal recognition of trimesters harkened back to when quickening was a legal marker of fetal viability.

But the Supreme Court did not deem later-stage abortion criminal. Instead individual states could —but did not have to—regulate abortions during the second and third trimesters of a woman's pregnancy as long as such laws did not interfere with maternal health.

Demands for abortion reform gained ground in nearly all Western countries in the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 1980s, abortion was legal in most Western European countries, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada (PDF File) .

In general, Protestant countries repealed their abortion laws earlier than predominantly Catholic countries. Ireland is currently the only Western European country to ban abortions in all cases.

Abortion in Europe and the U.S. Today

Following the legalization of abortion, a backlash crystallized on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Catholic Church, evangelical Protestant groups, and the New Right joined forces in the 1980s and 1990s to form antiabortion movements. This intense minority opposition to the legalization of abortion has been able to achieve some success in the United States. In comparison, the size and influence of antiabortion protests in Europe have been negligible.

The American movement mobilized around Roe v. Wade . The Court's finding discredited the belief that human life began at conception and undermined the idea that mothers should put their children's needs ahead of their own.

Since the 1970s, antiabortion activists have worked to create a discourse about abortion that portrays the fetus as innocent and the woman as a murderer. They have frequently quoted Mother Theresa as saying, "By abortion the Mother does not learn to love, but kills her own child to solve her problems." This conjures the image of a self-indulgent woman who rejects her natural calling as a mother and murders her own child.

While many of these ideas had been present in American antiabortion discourse since the late nineteenth century, the fetus has become important in a way that it never was before. Antiabortionists often refer to the fetus as a baby and emphasize its human characteristics. They have been particularly good at using images to try and get their message across to the American public.

"Prolife Across America" billboards on nearly every interstate include a color photo of what this group describes as a "winsome baby" who reveals a fact about fetal development such as, "My heart started beating 24 days after conception."

Antiabortionists also use enlarged pictures of aborted fetuses to argue that abortion is the murder of a human being. These are often pasted on the sides of trucks that drive through university campuses and in shopping malls.

The aim of these campaigns has been to overturn Roe v. Wade . They have not succeeded but have chipped away at the full impact of the law.

The 1977 Hyde Amendment stipulated funding restrictions, waiting periods, parental consent clauses, and counseling requirements. Antiabortion activists have also tried to prevent abortions by picketing clinics, harassing doctors and patients, and in some cases bombing clinics and assassinating physicians.

Since the 1980s, opposition to abortion has become a core tenet of conservative politics. In their struggles to control women's reproductive and sexual freedom, right-wing politicians have tried to restrict women's access to legal abortion services.

Many of their current efforts focus on the idea of fetal life. The Ohio Heartbeat Bill would prohibit abortion from the first detection of a heartbeat. Recently the Arizona state legislature passed a law that counts gestational age as beginning two weeks prior to conception in order to ban abortions after the 18th week of pregnancy.

Paradoxically, this climate of political antagonism toward legal abortion takes place at a time when most Americans (77%) believe abortion should be legal. In fact, a May 2012 Gallup Poll found that more Americans think abortion should be legal for any reason (25%) than illegal in all circumstances (20%).

The political strength of the antiabortion movement and their association with the Republican Party obscures the presence of this acceptance towards abortion. The political conflict over abortion in the United States has had no real equivalent in Western Europe, and as a result abortion laws remain largely intact. Antiabortion movements do exist, but have not succeeded at recasting abortion as an issue of fetal rights.

Religious arguments typically do not have as much sway in secularized Western Europe as they do in the United States and as a result it is more difficult to make moralistic arguments about abortion.

In many European countries legal abortion is restricted to the first trimester of pregnancy, and antiabortion activists have a hard time convincing the public that these abortions constitute murder. For many Europeans abortion is simply another service that the welfare state provides in order to ensure equal access to safe and affordable health care.

European laws have not been diluted by restrictive legislation that limits access to abortion services. In the predominantly Catholic Western European countries—where the strictest abortion restrictions have been in place—efforts to loosen these regulations have recently been under way. Portugal legalized abortion in 2007 and now allows women to have abortions for any reason during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.

Even in those Catholic countries where abortion access is severely restricted, women still have abortions.

In Ireland, this often means traveling to nearby England. In one case from 2010, Michelle Harte, who was dying of cancer, was told by doctors at Cork University Hospital that she should terminate her pregnancy for medical reasons, but the same doctors refused to perform the illegal procedure. Weak and prone to vomiting, she hired a nurse to fly with her to England so she could obtain the necessary abortion services. Cases like these have been the driving force behind abortion reform discussions in Ireland.

The history of abortion practices and policies reminds us that while people will likely continue to debate the origins of human life and the right a woman has to end her pregnancy, women will continue to have abortions. The legal status of abortion will not determine whether a woman will abort an unwanted pregnancy but rather whether she will have access to safe abortion services.

Beisel, Nicola Kay. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Duff, J. Milton. "Chairman's Address." American Gynecological Journal I-III, no. 9 (1893).

Ferree, Myra Marx. Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Garrow, David J. Liberty and Sexuality: the Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. New York: Macmillan Pub. Co., 1994.

Herzog, Dagmar. Sexuality in Europe: a Twentieth-Century History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Jelen, Ted G, John O'Donnell, and Clyde Wilcox. "A Contextual Analysis of Catholicism and Abortion Attitudes in Western Europe." Sociology of Religion 54, no. 4 (1993): 375–383.

Kline, Wendy. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. University of California Press, 2005.

Linders, Annulla. "Victory and Beyond: A Historical Comparative Analysis of the Outcomes of the Abortion Movements in Sweden and the United States." Sociological Forum 19, no. 3 (2004): 371–404.

Lyons, Clare A. Sex Among the Rabble: an Intimate History of Gender & Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Maguire, Daniel C. Sacred Rights: The Case for Contraception and Abortion in World Religions . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.

McBride, Dorothy E. Abortion in the United States: a Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA.: ABC-CLIO, 2008.

Mohr, James C. Abortion in America: the Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Reagan, Leslie J. When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Riddle, John M. Eve's Herbs: a History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

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Abortion was once common practice in America. A small group of doctors changed that

Ramtin Arablouei

Rund Abdelfatah

Abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America it would have been considered a fairly common practice. But in the mid-1800s, a small group of physicians set out to change that.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

• Historical Abortion Law Timeline: 1850 to Today

Follow the journey of abortion law in the United States — from criminalization in the late 1800s to legalization in the early 1970s — and the ongoing battles for abortion access.

1847: Formation of the American Medical Association (AMA)

In 1847, doctors banded together to form the AMA. It became the male-dominated authority on medical practices. The AMA scrutinized reproductive health care workers, like midwives and nurses, and the obstetric  services they provided were phased out. 

AMA members believed they should have the power to decide when an abortion could be legally performed. At the same time, the AMA was composed of physicians who lacked expertise in pregnancy and reproductive health.

• AMA members launched a full-fledged criminalization campaign against abortion and female abortion providers. State legislatures moved to ban abortion.

1880s: Criminalization and Vilification

This backlash kicked off a “century of criminalization,” which was ended by Roe v. Wade in 1973 (see below).

Laws restricting abortion access became the norm. 

By 1880, all states had laws to restrict abortion — with exceptions in some states if a doctor said the abortion was needed to save the life or health of the patient, or for therapeutic reasons . 

As abortion became criminalized, the stigma surrounding it grew.

1910: Abortion Bans Nationwide

By 1910 , abortion was not only restricted but outright illegal at every stage in pregnancy in every state in the country. These abortion bans had some exceptions in instances to save the patient’s life — a decision that only doctors, 95% of whom were men , had the power to make.

By this time, America had experienced several decades of increased immigration. Worried about losing their hold on the country, white men in power supported abortion bans as a way to get upper-class white women to have more children.

1930: Deaths from Illegal, Unsafe Abortions

Criminalizing abortion sent the practice underground, which resulted in a high death toll. 

Unsafe, illegal abortion was the cause of death for nearly 2,700 women in 1930 — almost one out of every five (18%) of recorded maternal deaths that year, according to the Guttmacher Institute .

1955: Conference on Abortion Legalization

In response to increasingly alarming media coverage of unsafe, illegal abortions, Planned Parenthood held a first-of-its-kind conference on the issue of abortion.

The doctors who attended the national conference on abortion made the bold move to publicly call for abortion law reform. 

Conference attendees said that laws should be rewritten to allow doctors greater latitude to provide abortion services, which would improve public health and access to reproductive health care for people of different economic circumstances.

1962: Thalidomide

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, thousands of pregnant women took a drug called thalidomide to ease pregnancy symptoms. The problem: It was found to cause severe birth defects. 

In 1962, a pregnant TV host who ingested thalidomide could not obtain a legal abortion in the United States. The media tracked her journey to get an abortion in Sweden, and 52% of Americans supported her.

The thalidomide fallout brought greater support for abortion law reform.

1964 : Association for the Study of Abortion (ASA)

In 1964, abortion law reform activists registered their first national group: the Association for the Study of Abortion (ASA).

Planned Parenthood joined doctors and laypeople leading the ASA in advocating for abortion law reforms and for studies that would advance abortion procedure safety.

In a strategic move to incrementally increase abortion access, the ASA advocated only for " medically necessary " abortions. But members of the larger abortion law reform movement wanted a full repeal to legalize abortion for all people.

1966 : Trial of the San Francisco Nine  

Nine well-respected doctors were sued in California for performing abortions on women who had been exposed to rubella, a disease known to cause birth defects. 

Doctors across the country came to the defense of the San Francisco Nine, including the deans of 128 medical schools. 

This resulted in one of the first abortion reform measures in the United States. California amended its prohibition on abortion to allow hospital committees to approve requests for abortion.

1969: NARAL Established

The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) was established in Chicago at the First National Conference on Abortion Laws.

NARAL was the first national group created solely to campaign for the legalization of abortion, marking the start of direct action to repeal abortion bans.

Late 1960s and early 1970s: Abortion Reform

By the late 1960s, a nationwide effort was underway to reform abortion laws in nearly every state. 

Health care providers, advocates, clergy members, and the legal community lobbied state legislatures and went to court to overturn statutes that had been in place since before the turn of the century. 

Between 1967 and 1973, four states — Alaska, Hawaii, New York, and Washington — repealed their abortion bans entirely, while 13 others enacted reforms that expanded exceptions. Instead of just allowing for abortion to save the patient’s life, they now allowed it in instances where a pregnancy was dangerous for the physical or mental health of a patient, fetal abnormalities, and when the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.

1970: Legal Abortion in New York

In 1970, New York state legalized abortion . One day after that law took effect, a Planned Parenthood health center in Syracuse became the the first Planned Parenthood health center to provide abortion services, and the first free-standing abortion center nationwide. 

In the first two years after abortion was legalized in New York, two-thirds of the abortions performed in the state were on patients who had traveled from other states  — most of which still outlawed abortion. At the time, other states that had legalized abortion required patients to be state residents.

1973: Roe v. Wade

In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution protects the right to abortion. 

In particular, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that the constitutional right to privacy “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”

Roe v. Wade protected the right to abortion in all 50 states, making abortion services safer and more accessible throughout the country. The decision also set a legal precedent that affected dozens of subsequent Supreme Court cases.

1976: Hyde Amendment Put Into Place

The Hyde Amendment is a discriminatory and racist policy that prevents federal dollars from being used in government insurance programs like Medicaid for abortion services (except in instances of incest, rape, or life-threatening risk to the pregnant person). 

The legislation was created by Rep. Henry Hyde. “I would certainly like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion: a rich woman, a middle class woman, or a poor woman,” he said. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the [Medicaid] bill.”

Because of centuries of systemic racism and bias, Medicaid disproportionately serves Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ communities — people who already face other barriers to care and economic opportunity.

Despite the federal law, 16 states currently include abortion in their Medicaid programs using state funds. (The remaining 34 states and the District of Columbia do not have abortion coverage in their Medicaid programs due to the Hyde Amendment).

Thanks in large part to the advocacy of reproductive justice organizations, in 2021 the Biden-Harris administration became the first administration in decades to exclude the Hyde Amendment from its presidential budget.

1984: Global Gag Rule

Former President Ronald Reagan introduced the Mexico City policy, otherwise known as the global gag rule, in 1984. 

The global gag rule prevents foreign organizations that receive U.S. health aid from providing information on and referrals for abortions or advocating for abortion access.

Every president since Reagan who supports abortion access has rescinded the global gag rule, while every president since Reagan who opposes abortion access has reinstated it. That includes President Donald Trump , who not only reinstated it, but expanded the global gag rule to make it even more harmful.

1992: Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey

This landmark case reaffirmed that the Constitution protects the right to abortion.

However, Casey created an “undue burden” framework, under which laws restricting access to abortion would be judged. This framework made it more difficult to challenge laws that were less than absolute prohibitions on abortion — requiring challenges to show that a law has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a patient seeking an abortion.

Following Casey , state politicians passed numerous medically unnecessary abortion restrictions across the country which courts have found do not impose an undue burden.

2007: Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America

The Supreme Court upheld the first federal legislation to criminalize abortion , allowing Congress to ban certain second-trimester abortion procedures — which are sometimes the safest and best way to protect a patient’s health.

Because the legislation does not contain an exception for the patient’s health, the Supreme Court effectively overruled a key component of Roe v. Wade : that the patient’s health must be of paramount concern in laws that restrict abortion access.

2016: Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt

The Supreme Court ruled that two Texas abortion restrictions were unconstitutional because they would shut down most abortion providers in the state and impose an “undue burden” on access to safe, legal abortion in Texas.

2020: June Medical Services v. Russo

On June 29, 2020 — in June Medical Services v. Russo — the Supreme Court struck down a medically unnecessary law that was nearly identical to the one it had struck down in Whole Woman’s Health . This law would have made abortion virtually inaccessible in Louisiana.

Four justices dissented, and it was the last time Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a chance to rule on abortion access before she died later that year. Ginsburg was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett — who is one of three Supreme Court justices nominated by Donald Trump.

2021: Texas Six-Week Ban

On Sept. 1, 2021, Texas implemented a dangerous law called S.B. 8. which bans abortion at approximately six weeks of pregnancy — before many people even know they’re pregnant. 

The AMA denounced the Texas abortion ban, but the Supreme Court allowed it to take effect.

Where We’re Headed 

This history of abortion laws and court decisions provides important context to the road ahead.

Right now, 80% of Americans want abortion to be legal. 

On December 1, 2021 , the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a case about a Mississippi ban on abortion at 15 weeks that’s a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade . The state of Mississippi not only has asked the Supreme Court to allow a pre- viability abortion ban, in violation of one of the core tenets of Roe v. Wade , but also has asked the Supreme Court to overrule Roe and Casey entirely.

The Supreme Court will issue a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization by the end of June 2022. If Roe is overturned or its protections are dismantled, then the laws governing abortion will fall to individual state governments. Many people of reproductive age will lose access to safe, legal abortion in the United States.

No matter what happens, Planned Parenthood will continue to fight to uphold access to safe, legal abortion.

Abortion Access

• Roe v. Wade Overturned: How the Supreme Court Let Politicians Outlaw Abortion
• Federal and State Bans and Restrictions on Abortion
• Types of State Attacks on Abortion
• The State of Emergency for Women's Health
• Timeline of Attacks on Abortion: 2009–2021

The History of Abortion in America

Abortion has been legal for much of American history. Learn how.

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• IPR Intranet

INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

The history of abortion politics.

IPR talks with IPR political scientist Chloe Thurston about politicians’ changing views on abortion and the role interest groups play

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As interest groups with intense policy preferences on abortion aligned with political parties, those groups helped to pull each party to a more cohesive and consistent pattern of voting.”

Chloe Thurston IPR political scientist

 In 1989, pro-choice demonstrators gather outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion remained one of the most polarizing issues among Democrats and Republicans, making it easy to predict politicians’ beliefs about abortion based on their political party. But that wasn’t always true.

A recent study by IPR political scientist Chloe Thurston and David Karol of the University of Maryland examines voting records of California state legislators from the 1960s–1990s to understand the growing ties between the Republican Party and the Christian Right and the Democratic Party and feminist organizations. The researchers show how legislators in California, one of the first states to pass legislation dealing with abortion, shifted from voting on abortion issues based on their religious beliefs to aligning with the emerging views of their political parties.

Thurston discusses the findings of the study, the power of interest groups in abortion politics, and how politicians have changed their views on abortion over time.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What did you find when you looked at voting records of California’s elected officials on abortion between 1967 and 1996?

We looked at voting in the California State Assembly before and after Roe v. Wade (in 1973). In 1967, California became one of the first states to liberalize its abortion law with the passage of the Therapeutic Abortion Act. Before that, abortion was governed by the 1872 criminal code, which outlawed it except in order to save the life of the mother (about thirty other states had similar laws on the books by the 1960s). The Therapeutic Abortion Act extended abortion access to cases where it would protect the physical and mental health of the mother, as well as in cases of rape and incest. Somewhat notably, it was signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, who would later change his position on abortion.  

We examined voting patterns in the State Assembly, which is the lower house of the legislature. At the time that the bill was voted on, the partisanship of the individual legislators was not very predictive of their vote for or against legalization. The issue had not yet polarized along partisan lines. Instead, religious affiliation (namely, whether a legislator identified as Catholic or not) was more predictive. If you think about abortion politics now, if you know that someone in Congress or in a state legislature is a Democrat or Republican, you can predict pretty closely their position on the issue.

We found that over time the effect of religion waned as partisan affiliation came to supplant the role of religion in predicting abortion support. Some of this was due to incumbent politicians shifting their voting behavior, while retirement and replacement of older legislators with those who were more in-tune with their party’s position also played a role.

C an you talk about how interest groups played a role in shifting legislators’ views on abortion from aligning with their religious beliefs to those of their political party?  

When we were trying to understand how to characterize that shift, we examined multiple different possibilities. We ultimately emphasize this as a shift from legislators relying on personal background characteristics to decide how to vote, towards relying on the cues sent to them by groups that began aligning with each of the political parties over this time.  

As interest groups with intense policy preferences on abortion aligned with political parties—feminist groups with the Democratic Party and evangelical religious groups aligning with the Republican Party—those groups helped to pull each party to a more cohesive and consistent pattern of voting.

Our theory is that [the interest groups] sent new cues to legislators about how they should be voting on that issue, where those cues were absent previously. At the time, of these first votes [in the legislature] prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion was a relatively new issue for voters and legislators, which may have given the latter some leeway in deciding how to vote. But as the issue develops over time, groups and parties may begin to send clearer signals about their policy positions. 

What does that say about the power of interest groups over elected officials?

Our paper is looking at a very narrow slice of this question. I would not take our findings to suggest that interest groups are singularly powerful, but our research does provide some evidence in support of the idea that interest groups can contribute to partisan polarization. Polling on the public’s support for abortion is notoriously sensitive to question wording, but that said, the public is generally supportive of abortion access with some restrictions. Interest groups tend to have more extreme preferences than the public on the issues that they do care about. So, this can at times contribute to the support and passage of policies that are more reflective of interest group preferences than broader public ones. This is something that political scientists have found some evidence for outside of abortion policy, for example with gun regulation.

Do you think that there’s room for politicians in our current system who don’t line up with their political party on abortion?  

I wrote an op-e d with my co-author David Karol for the Daily Beast a couple of years ago about one of the last anti-abortion Democratic members of Congress, Daniel Lipinski. This was right after he lost his primary election to Marie Newman, who had the support of a number of pro-choice organizations, like Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List. One could see his loss to a pro-choice challenger as illustrative of the process we demonstrated at the state level in California. Like some of the pro-life California legislators in the 1960s, Lipinski regularly invoked his Catholic faith in explaining his pro-life position. Lipinski’s divergence with his party may have become untenable as the parties’ positioning on these issues has increasingly diverged. However, the Dobbs decision has significantly altered the status quo on an issue where was a substantial amount of public support for the status quo. And moreover, our work on the dynamics of party polarization is a reminder that parties’ issue positions are not static but change over time in response to a variety of factors. 

One of the takeaways from your study is that the importance of personal background on a legislator’s vote can vary over time as the state of politics change. How do you see Ronald Reagan’s and Donald Trump’s shifts on abortion fitting into that idea?

It is common for politicians to change their positions on issues. In addition to President Reagan’s reversal on abortion (he later said he made a mistake in signing the 1967 Act as governor), Trump also shifted from pro-choice to pro-life. Biden’s views and positions have also shifted on this issue, from supporting a pro-life constitutional amendment in the 1980s, to pro-choice views in recent decades. Abortion is not special in this regard. Many politicians that previously opposed same-sex marriage now support it.

This points in some sense to the way that politicians are strategic actors, motivated by winning elections and willing to change their positions in pursuit of this goal. But people also just update their views over time, including through learning and experience. If their views are more in line with their constituents’, that may be seen as a positive from the standpoint of representative democracy.

Chloe Thurston is an assistant professor of political science and an IPR fellow.

Photo credit: L. Shaull

Published: August 16, 2022.

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• Rom J Morphol Embryol
• v.61(1); Jan-Mar 2020

A research on abortion: ethics, legislation and socio-medical outcomes. Case study: Romania

Andreea mihaela niţă.

1 Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Craiova, Romania

Cristina Ilie Goga

This article presents a research study on abortion from a theoretical and empirical point of view. The theoretical part is based on the method of social documents analysis, and presents a complex perspective on abortion, highlighting items of medical, ethical, moral, religious, social, economic and legal elements. The empirical part presents the results of a sociological survey, based on the opinion survey method through the application of the enquiry technique, conducted in Romania, on a sample of 1260 women. The purpose of the survey is to identify Romanians perception on the decision to voluntary interrupt pregnancy, and to determine the core reasons in carrying out an abortion.

The analysis of abortion by means of medical and social documents

Abortion means a pregnancy interruption “before the fetus is viable” [ 1 ] or “before the fetus is able to live independently in the extrauterine environment, usually before the 20 th week of pregnancy” [ 2 ]. “Clinical miscarriage is both a common and distressing complication of early pregnancy with many etiological factors like genetic factors, immune factors, infection factors but also psychological factors” [ 3 ]. Induced abortion is a practice found in all countries, but the decision to interrupt the pregnancy involves a multitude of aspects of medical, ethical, moral, religious, social, economic, and legal order.

In a more simplistic manner, Winston Nagan has classified opinions which have as central element “abortion”, in two major categories: the opinion that the priority element is represented by fetus and his entitlement to life and the second opinion, which focuses around women’s rights [ 4 ].

From the medical point of view, since ancient times there have been four moments, generally accepted, which determine the embryo’s life: ( i ) conception; ( ii ) period of formation; ( iii ) detection moment of fetal movement; ( iv ) time of birth [ 5 ]. Contemporary medicine found the following moments in the evolution of intrauterine fetal: “ 1 . At 18 days of pregnancy, the fetal heartbeat can be perceived and it starts running the circulatory system; 2 . At 5 weeks, they become more clear: the nose, cheeks and fingers of the fetus; 3 . At 6 weeks, they start to function: the nervous system, stomach, kidneys and liver of the fetus, and its skeleton is clearly distinguished; 4 . At 7 weeks (50 days), brain waves are felt. The fetus has all the internal and external organs definitively outlined. 5 . At 10 weeks (70 days), the unborn child has all the features clearly defined as a child after birth (9 months); 6 . At 12 weeks (92 days, 3 months), the fetus has all organs definitely shaped, managing to move, lacking only the breath” [ 6 ]. Even if most of the laws that allow abortion consider the period up to 12 weeks acceptable for such an intervention, according to the above-mentioned steps, there can be defined different moments, which can represent the beginning of life. Nowadays, “abortion is one of the most common gynecological experiences and perhaps the majority of women will undergo an abortion in their lifetimes” [ 7 ]. “Safe abortions carry few health risks, but « every year, close to 20 million women risk their lives and health by undergoing unsafe abortions » and 25% will face a complication with permanent consequences” [ 8 , 9 ].

From the ethical point of view, most of the times, the interruption of pregnancy is on the border between woman’s right over her own body and the child’s (fetus) entitlement to life. Judith Jarvis Thomson supported the supremacy of woman’s right over her own body as a premise of freedom, arguing that we cannot force a person to bear in her womb and give birth to an unwanted child, if for different circumstances, she does not want to do this [ 10 ]. To support his position, the author uses an imaginary experiment, that of a violinist to which we are connected for nine months, in order to save his life. However, Thomson debates the problem of the differentiation between the fetus and the human being, by carrying out a debate on the timing which makes this difference (period of conception, 10 weeks of pregnancy, etc.) and highlighting that for people who support abortion, the fetus is not an alive human being [ 10 ].

Carol Gilligan noted that women undergo a true “moral dilemma”, a “moral conflict” with regards to voluntary interruption of pregnancy, such a decision often takes into account the human relationships, the possibility of not hurting the others, the responsibility towards others [ 11 ]. Gilligan applied qualitative interviews to a number of 29 women from different social classes, which were put in a position to decide whether or not to commit abortion. The interview focused on the woman’s choice, on alternative options, on individuals and existing conflicts. The conclusion was that the central moral issue was the conflict between the self (the pregnant woman) and others who may be hurt as a result of the potential pregnancy [ 12 ].

From the religious point of view, abortion is unacceptable for all religions and a small number of abortions can be seen in deeply religious societies and families. Christianity considers the beginning of human life from conception, and abortion is considered to be a form of homicide [ 13 ]. For Christians, “at the same time, abortion is giving up their faith”, riot and murder, which means that by an abortion we attack Jesus Christ himself and God [ 14 ]. Islam does not approve abortion, relying on the sacral life belief as specified in Chapter 6, Verse 151 of the Koran: “Do not kill a soul which Allah has made sacred (inviolable)” [ 15 ]. Buddhism considers abortion as a negative act, but nevertheless supports for medical reasons [ 16 ]. Judaism disapproves abortion, Tanah considering it to be a mortal sin. Hinduism considers abortion as a crime and also the greatest sin [ 17 ].

From the socio-economic point of view, the decision to carry out an abortion is many times determined by the relations within the social, family or financial frame. Moreover, studies have been conducted, which have linked the legalization of abortions and the decrease of the crime rate: “legalized abortion may lead to reduced crime either through reductions in cohort sizes or through lower per capita offending rates for affected cohorts” [ 18 ].

Legal regulation on abortion establishes conditions of the abortion in every state. In Europe and America, only in the XVIIth century abortion was incriminated and was considered an insignificant misdemeanor or a felony, depending on when was happening. Due to the large number of illegal abortions and deaths, two centuries later, many states have changed legislation within the meaning of legalizing voluntary interruption of pregnancy [ 6 ]. In contemporary society, international organizations like the United Nations or the European Union consider sexual and reproductive rights as fundamental rights [ 19 , 20 ], and promotes the acceptance of abortion as part of those rights. However, not all states have developed permissive legislation in the field of voluntary interruption of pregnancy.

Currently, at national level were established four categories of legislation on pregnancy interruption area:

( i )  Prohibitive legislations , ones that do not allow abortion, most often outlining exceptions in abortion in cases where the pregnant woman’s life is endangered. In some countries, there is a prohibition of abortion in all circumstances, however, resorting to an abortion in the case of an imminent threat to the mother’s life. Same regulation is also found in some countries where abortion is allowed in cases like rape, incest, fetal problems, etc. In this category are 66 states, with 25.5% of world population [ 21 ].

( ii )  Restrictive legislation that allow abortion in cases of health preservation . Loosely, the term “health” should be interpreted according to the World Health Organization (WHO) definition as: “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” [ 22 ]. This type of legislation is adopted in 59 states populated by 13.8% of the world population [ 21 ].

( iii )  Legislation allowing abortion on a socio-economic motivation . This category includes items such as the woman’s age or ability to care for a child, fetal problems, cases of rape or incest, etc. In this category are 13 countries, where we have 21.3% of the world population [ 21 ].

( iv )  Legislation which do not impose restrictions on abortion . In the case of this legislation, abortion is permitted for any reason up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions (Romania – 14 weeks, Slovenia – 10 weeks, Sweden – 18 weeks), the interruption of pregnancy after this period has some restrictions. This type of legislation is adopted in 61 countries with 39.5% of the world population [21].

The Centre for Reproductive Rights has carried out from 1998 a map of the world’s states, based on the legislation typology of each country (Figure ​ (Figure1 1 ).

The analysis of states according to the legislation regarding abortion. Source: Centre for Reproductive Rights. The World’s Abortion Laws, 2018 [ 23 ]

An unplanned pregnancy, socio-economic context or various medical problems [ 24 ], lead many times to the decision of interrupting pregnancy, regardless the legislative restrictions. In the study “Unsafe abortion: global and regional estimates of the incidence of unsafe abortion and associated mortality in 2008” issued in 2011 by the WHO , it was determined that within the states with restrictive legislation on abortion, we may also encounter a large number of illegal abortions. The illegal abortions may also be resulting in an increased risk of woman’s health and life considering that most of the times inappropriate techniques are being used, the hygienic conditions are precarious and the medical treatments are incorrectly administered [ 25 ]. Although abortions done according to medical guidelines carry very low risk of complications, 1–3 unsafe abortions contribute substantially to maternal morbidity and death worldwide [ 26 ].

WHO has estimated for the year 2008, the fact that worldwide women between the ages of 15 and 44 years carried out 21.6 million “unsafe” abortions, which involved a high degree of risk and were distributed as follows: 0.4 million in the developed regions and a number of 21.2 million in the states in course of development [ 25 ].

Case study: Romania

Legal perspective on abortion

In Romania, abortion was brought under regulation by the first Criminal Code of the United Principalities, from 1864.

The Criminal Code from 1864, provided the abortion infringement in Article 246, on which was regulated as follows: “Any person, who, using means such as food, drinks, pills or any other means, which will consciously help a pregnant woman to commit abortion, will be punished to a minimum reclusion (three years).

The woman who by herself shall use the means of abortion, or would accept to use means of abortion which were shown or given to her for this purpose, will be punished with imprisonment from six months to two years, if the result would be an abortion. In a situation where abortion was carried out on an illegitimate baby by his mother, the punishment will be imprisonment from six months to one year.

Doctors, surgeons, health officers, pharmacists (apothecary) and midwives who will indicate, will give or will facilitate these means, shall be punished with reclusion of at least four years, if the abortion took place. If abortion will cause the death of the mother, the punishment will be much austere of four years” (Art. 246) [ 27 ].

The Criminal Code from 1864, reissued in 1912, amended in part the Article 246 for the purposes of eliminating the abortion of an illegitimate baby case. Furthermore, it was no longer specified the minimum of four years of reclusion, in case of abortion carried out with the help of the medical staff, leaving the punishment to the discretion of the Court (Art. 246) [ 28 ].

The Criminal Code from 1936 regulated abortion in the Articles 482–485. Abortion was defined as an interruption of the normal course of pregnancy, being punished as follows:

“ 1 . When the crime is committed without the consent of the pregnant woman, the punishment was reformatory imprisonment from 2 to 5 years. If it caused the pregnant woman any health injury or a serious infirmity, the punishment was reformatory imprisonment from 3 to 6 years, and if it has caused her death, reformatory imprisonment from 7 to 10 years;

2 . When the crime was committed by the unmarried pregnant woman by herself, or when she agreed that someone else should provoke the abortion, the punishment is reformatory imprisonment from 3 to 6 months, and if the woman is married, the punishment is reformatory imprisonment from 6 months to one year. Same penalty applies also to the person who commits the crime with the woman’s consent. If abortion was committed for the purpose of obtaining a benefit, the punishment increases with another 2 years of reformatory imprisonment.

If it caused the pregnant woman any health injuries or a severe disablement, the punishment will be reformatory imprisonment from one to 3 years, and if it has caused her death, the punishment is reformatory imprisonment from 3 to 5 years” (Art. 482) [ 29 ].

The criminal legislation from 1936 specifies that it is not considered as an abortion the interruption from the normal course of pregnancy, if it was carried out by a doctor “when woman’s life was in imminent danger or when the pregnancy aggravates a woman’s disease, putting her life in danger, which could not be removed by other means and it is obvious that the intervention wasn’t performed with another purpose than that of saving the woman’s life” and “when one of the parents has reached a permanent alienation and it is certain that the child will bear serious mental flaws” (Art. 484, Par. 1 and Par. 2) [ 29 ].

In the event of an imminent danger, the doctor was obliged to notify prosecutor’s office in writing, within 48 hours after the intervention, on the performance of the abortion. “In the other cases, the doctor was able to intervene only with the authorization of the prosecutor’s office, given on the basis of a medical certificate from hospital or a notice given as a result of a consultation between the doctor who will intervene and at least a professor doctor in the disease which caused the intervention. General’s Office Prosecutor, in all cases provided by this Article, shall be obliged to maintain the confidentiality of all communications or authorizations, up to the intercession of any possible complaints” (Art. 484) [ 29 ].

The legislation of 1936 provided a reformatory injunction from one to three years for the abortions committed by doctors, sanitary agents, pharmacists, apothecary or midwives (Art. 485) [ 29 ].

Abortion on demand has been legalized for the first time in Romania in the year 1957 by the Decree No. 463, under the condition that it had to be carried out in a hospital and to be carried out in the first quarter of the pregnancy [ 30 ]. In the year 1966, demographic policy of Romania has dramatically changed by introducing the Decree No. 770 from September 29 th , which prohibited abortion. Thus, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy became a crime, with certain exceptions, namely: endangering the mother’s life, physical or mental serious disability; serious or heritable illness, mother’s age over 45 years, if the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest or if the woman gave birth to at least four children who were still in her care (Art. 2) [ 31 ].

In the Criminal Code from 1968, the abortion crime was governed by Articles 185–188.

The Article 185, “the illegal induced abortion”, stipulated that “the interruption of pregnancy by any means, outside the conditions permitted by law, with the consent of the pregnant woman will be punished with imprisonment from one to 3 years”. The act referred to above, without the prior consent from the pregnant woman, was punished with prison from two to five years. If the abortion carried out with the consent of the pregnant woman caused any serious body injury, the punishment was imprisonment from two to five years, and when it caused the death of the woman, the prison sentence was from five to 10 years. When abortion was carried out without the prior consent of the woman, if it caused her a serious physical injury, the punishment was imprisonment from three to six years, and if it caused the woman’s death, the punishment was imprisonment from seven to 12 years (Art. 185) [ 32 ].

“When abortion was carried out in order to obtain a material benefit, the maximum punishment was increased by two years, and if the abortion was made by a doctor, in addition to the prison punishment could also be applied the prohibition to no longer practice the profession of doctor”.

Article 186, “abortion caused by the woman”, stipulated that “the interruption of the pregnancy course, committed by the pregnant woman, was punished with imprisonment from 6 months to 2 years”, quoting the fact that by the same punishment was also sanctioned “the pregnant woman’s act to consent in interrupting the pregnancy course made out by another person” (Art. 186) [ 26 ].

The Regulations of the Criminal Code in 1968, also provided the crime of “ownership of tools or materials that can cause abortion”, the conditions of this holding being met when these types of instruments were held outside the hospital’s specialized institutions, the infringement shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to one year (Art. 187) [ 32 ].

Furthermore, the doctors who performed an abortion in the event of extreme urgency, without prior legal authorization and if they did not announce the competent authority within the legal deadline, they were punished by imprisonment from one month to three months (Art. 188) [ 32 ].

In the year 1985, it has been issued the Decree No. 411 of December 26 th , by which the conditions imposed by the Decree No. 770 of 1966 have been hardened, meaning that it has increased the number of children, that a woman could have in order to request an abortion, from four to five children [ 33 ].

The Articles 185–188 of the Criminal Code and the Decree No. 770/1966 on the interruption of the pregnancy course have been abrogated by Decree-Law No. 1 from December 26 th , 1989, which was published in the Official Gazette No. 4 of December 27 th , 1989 (Par. 8 and Par. 12) [ 34 ].

The Criminal Code from 1968, reissued in 1997, maintained Article 185 about “the illegal induced abortion”, but drastically modified. Thus, in this case of the Criminal Code, we identify abortion as “the interruption of pregnancy course, by any means, committed in any of the following circumstances: ( a ) outside medical institutions or authorized medical practices for this purpose; ( b ) by a person who does not have the capacity of specialized doctor; ( c ) if age pregnancy has exceeded 14 weeks”, the punishment laid down was the imprisonment from 6 months to 3 years” (Art. 185, Par. 1) [ 35 ]. For the abortion committed without the prior consent of the pregnant woman, the punishment consisted in strict prison conditions from two to seven years and with the prohibition of certain rights (Art. 185, Par. 2) [ 35 ].

For the situation of causing serious physical injury to the pregnant woman, the punishment was strict prison from three to 10 years and the removal of certain rights, and if it had as a result the death of the pregnant woman, the punishment was strict prison from five to 15 years and the prohibition of certain rights (Art. 185, Par. 3) [ 35 ].

The attempt was punished for the crimes specified in the various cases of abortion.

Consideration should also be given in the Criminal Code reissued in 1997 for not punishing the interruption of the pregnancy course carried out by the doctor, if this interruption “was necessary to save the life, health or the physical integrity of the pregnant woman from a grave and imminent danger and that it could not be removed otherwise; in the case of a over fourteen weeks pregnancy, when the interruption of the pregnancy course should take place from therapeutic reasons” and even in a situation of a woman’s lack of consent, when it has not been given the opportunity to express her will, and abortion “was imposed by therapeutic reasons” (Art. 185, Par. 4) [ 35 ].

Criminal Code from 2004 covers abortion in Article 190, defined in the same way as in the prior Criminal Code, with the difference that it affects the limits of the punishment. So, in the event of pregnancy interruption, in accordance with the conditions specified in Paragraph 1, “the penalty provided was prison time from 6 months to one year or days-fine” (Art. 190, Par. 1) [ 36 ].

Nowadays, in Romania, abortion is governed by the criminal law of 2009, which entered into force in 2014, by the section called “aggression against an unborn child”. It should be specified that current criminal law does not punish the woman responsible for carrying out abortion, but only the person who is involved in carrying out the abortion. There is no punishment for the pregnant woman who injures her fetus during pregnancy.

In Article 201, we can find the details on the pregnancy interruption infringement. Thus, the pregnancy interruption can be performed in one of the following circumstances: “outside of medical institutions or medical practices authorized for this purpose; by a person who does not have the capacity of specialist doctor in Obstetrics and Gynecology and the right of free medical practice in this specialty; if gestational age has exceeded 14 weeks”, the punishment is the imprisonment for six months to three years, or fine and the prohibition to exercise certain rights (Art. 201, Par. 1) [ 37 ].

Article 201, Paragraph 2 specifies that “the interruption of the pregnancy committed under any circumstances, without the prior consent of the pregnant woman, can be punished with imprisonment from 2 to 7 years and with the prohibition to exercise some rights” (Art. 201, Par. 1) [ 37 ].

If by facts referred to above (Art. 201, Par. 1 and Par. 2) [ 37 ] “it has caused the pregnant woman’s physical injury, the punishment is the imprisonment from 3 to 10 years and the prohibition to exercise some rights, and if it has had as a result the pregnant woman’s death, the punishment is the imprisonment from 6 to 12 years and the prohibition to exercise some rights” (Art. 201, Par. 3) [ 37 ]. When the facts have been committed by a doctor, “in addition to the imprisonment punishment, it will also be applied the prohibition to exercise the profession of doctor (Art. 201, Par. 4) [ 37 ].

Criminal legislation specifies that “the interruption of pregnancy does not constitute an infringement with the purpose of a treatment carried out by a specialist doctor in Obstetrics and Gynecology, until the pregnancy age of twenty-four weeks is reached, or the subsequent pregnancy interruption, for the purpose of treatment, is in the interests of the mother or the fetus” (Art. 201, Par. 6) [ 37 ]. However, it can all be found in the phrases “therapeutic purposes” and “the interest of the mother and of the unborn child”, which predisposes the text of law to an interpretation, finally the doctors are the only ones in the position to decide what should be done in such cases, assuming direct responsibility [ 38 ].

Article 202 of the Criminal Code defines the crime of harming an unborn child, pointing out the punishments for the various types of injuries that can occur during pregnancy or in the childbirth period and which can be caused by the mother or by the persons who assist the birth, with the specification that the mother who harms her fetus during pregnancy is not punished and does not constitute an infringement if the injury has been committed during pregnancy or during childbirth period if the facts have been “committed by a doctor or by an authorized person to assist the birth or to follow the pregnancy, if they have been committed in the course of the medical act, complying with the specific provisions of his profession and have been made in the interest of the pregnant woman or fetus, as a result of the exercise of an inherent risk in the medical act” (Art. 202, Par. 6) [ 37 ].

The fact situation in Romania

During the period 1948–1955, called “the small baby boom” [ 39 ], Romania registered an average fertility rate of 3.23 children for a woman. Between 1955 and 1962, the fertility rate has been less than three children for a woman, and in 1962, fertility has reached an average of two children for a woman. This phenomenon occurred because of the Decree No. 463/1957 on liberalization of abortion. After the liberalization from 1957, the abortion rate has increased from 220 abortions per 100 born-alive children in the year 1960, to 400 abortions per 100 born-alive children, in the year 1965 [ 40 ].

The application of provisions of Decrees No. 770 of 1966 and No. 411 of 1985 has led to an increase of the birth rate in the first three years (an average of 3.7 children in 1967, and 3.6 children in 1968), followed by a regression until 1989, when it was recorded an average of 2.2 children, but also a maternal death rate caused by illegal abortions, raising up to 85 deaths of 100 000 births in the year of 1965, and 170 deaths in 1983. It was estimated that more than 80% of maternal deaths between 1980–1989 was caused by legal constraints [ 30 ].

After the Romanian Revolution in December 1989 and after the communism fall, with the abrogation of Articles 185–188 of the Criminal Code and of the Decree No. 770/1966, by the Decree of Law No. 1 of December 26 th , 1989, abortion has become legal in Romania and so, in the following years, it has reached the highest rate of abortion in Europe. Subsequently, the number of abortion has dropped gradually, with increasing use of birth control [ 41 ].

Statistical data issued by the Ministry of Health and by the National Institute of Statistics (INS) in Romania show corresponding figures to a legally carried out abortion. The abortion number is much higher, if it would take into account the number of illegal abortion, especially those carried out before 1989, and those carried out in private clinics, after the year 1990. Summing the declared abortions in the period 1958–2014, it is to be noted the number of them, 22 037 747 exceeds the current Romanian population. A detailed statistical research of abortion rate, in terms of years we have exposed in Table ​ Table1 1 .

The number of abortions declared in Romania in the period 1958–2016

Source: Pro Vita Association (Bucharest, Romania), National Institute of Statistics (INS – Romania), EUROSTAT [ 42 , 43 , 44 ]

Data issued by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in June 2016, for the period 1989–2014, in matters of reproductive behavior, indicates a fertility rate for Romania with a continuous decrease, in proportion to the decrease of the number of births, but also a lower number of abortion rate reported to 100 deliveries (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Reproductive behavior in Romania in 1989–2014

Source: United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), Transformative Monitoring for Enhanced Equity (TransMonEE) Data. Country profiles: Romania, 1989–2015 [ 45 ].

By analyzing data issued for the period 1990–2015 by the International Organization of Health , UNICEF , United Nations Fund for Population Activity (UNFPA), The World Bank and the United Nations Population Division, it is noticed that maternal mortality rate has currently dropped as compared with 1990 (Table ​ (Table3 3 ).

Maternal mortality estimation in Romania in 1990–2015

Source: World Health Organization (WHO), Global Health Observatory Data. Maternal mortality country profiles: Romania, 2015 [ 46 ].

Opinion survey: women’s opinion on abortion

Argument for choosing the research theme

Although the problematic on abortion in Romania has been extensively investigated and debated, it has not been carried out in an ample sociological study, covering Romanian women’s perception on abortion. We have assumed making a study at national level, in order to identify the opinion on abortion, on the motivation to carry out an abortion, and to identify the correlation between religious convictions and the attitude toward abortion.

Examining the literature field of study

In the conceptual register of the research, we have highlighted items, such as the specialized literature, legislation, statistical documents.

Formulation of hypotheses and objectives

The first hypothesis was that Romanian women accept abortion, having an open attitude towards this act. Thus, the first objective of the research was to identify Romanian women’s attitude towards abortion.

The second hypothesis, from which we started, was that high religious beliefs generate a lower tolerance towards abortion. Thus, the second objective of our research has been to identify the correlation between the religious beliefs and the attitude towards abortion.

The third hypothesis of the survey was that, the main motivation in carrying out an abortion is the fact that a woman does not want a baby, and the main motivation for keeping the pregnancy is that the person wants a baby. In this context, the third objective of the research was to identify main motivation in carrying out an abortion and in maintaining a pregnancy.

Another hypothesis was that modern Romanian legislation on the abortion is considered fair. Based on this hypothesis, we have assumed the fourth objective, which is to identify the degree of satisfaction towards the current regulatory provisions governing the abortion.

Research methodology

The research method is that of a sociological survey by the application of the questionnaire technique. We used the sampling by age and residence looking at representative numbers of population from more developed as well as underdeveloped areas.

Determination of the sample to be studied

Because abortion is a typical women’s experience, we have chosen to make the quantitative research only among women. We have constructed the sample by selecting a number of 1260 women between the ages of 15 and 44 years (the most frequently encountered age among women who give birth to a child). We also used the quota sampling techniques, taking into account the following variables: age group and the residence (urban/rural), so that the persons included in the sample could retain characteristic of the general population.

By the sample of 1260 women, we have made a percentage of investigation of 0.03% of the total population.

The Questionnaires number applied was distributed as follows (Table ​ (Table4 4 ).

The sampling rates based on the age, and the region of residence

Source: Sample built, based on the population data issued by the National Institute of Statistics (INS – Romania) based on population census conducted in 2011 [ 47 ].

Data collection

Data collection was carried out by questionnaires administered by 32 field operators between May 1 st –May 31 st , 2018.

The analysis of the research results

In the next section, we will present the main results of the quantitative research carried out at national level.

Almost three-quarters of women included in the sample agree with carrying out an abortion in certain circumstances (70%) and only 24% have chosen to support the answer “ No, never ”. In modern contemporary society, abortion is the first solution of women for which a pregnancy is not desired. Even if advanced medical techniques are a lot safer, an abortion still carries a health risk. However, 6% of respondents agree with carrying out abortion regardless of circumstances (Table ​ (Table5 5 ).

Opinion on the possibility of carrying out an abortion

Although abortions carried out after 14 weeks are illegal, except for medical reasons, more than half of the surveyed women stated they would agree with abortion in certain circumstances. At the opposite pole, 31% have mentioned they would never agree on abortions after 14 weeks. Five percent were totally accepting the idea of abortion made to a pregnancy that has exceeded 14 weeks (Table ​ (Table6 6 ).

Opinion on the possibility of carrying out an abortion after the period of 14 weeks of pregnancy

For 53% of respondents, abortion is considered a crime as well as the right of a women. On the other hand, 28% of the women considered abortion as a crime and 16% associate abortion with a woman’s right (Table ​ (Table7 7 ).

Opinion on abortion: at the border between crime and a woman’s right

Opinions on what women abort at the time of the voluntary pregnancy interruption are split in two: 59% consider that it depends on the time of the abortion, and more specifically on the pregnancy development stage, 24% consider that regardless of the period in which it is carried out, women abort a child, and 14% have opted a fetus (Table ​ (Table8 8 ).

Abortion of a child vs. abortion of a fetus

Among respondents who consider that women abort a child or a fetus related to the time of abortion, 37.5% have considered that the difference between a baby and a fetus appears after 14 weeks of pregnancy (the period legally accepted for abortion). Thirty-three percent of them have mentioned that the distinction should be performed at the first few heartbeats; 18.1% think it is about when the child has all the features definitively outlined and can move by himself; 2.8% consider that the difference appears when the first encephalopathy traces are being felt and the child has formed all internal and external organs. A percentage of 1.7% of respondents consider that this difference occurs at the beginning of the central nervous system, and 1.4% when the unborn child has all the features that we can clearly see to a newborn child (Table ​ (Table9 9 ).

The opinion on the moment that makes the difference between a fetus and a child

We noticed that highly religious people make a clear association between abortion and crime. They also consider that at the time of pregnancy interruption it is aborted a child and not a fetus. However, unexpectedly, we noticed that 27% of the women, who declare themselves to be very religious, have also stated that they see abortion as a crime but also as a woman’s right. Thirty-one percent of the women, who also claimed profound religious beliefs, consider that abortion may be associated with the abortion of a child but also of a fetus, this depending on the time of abortion (Tables ​ (Tables10 10 and ​ and11 11 ).

The correlation between the level of religious beliefs and the perspective on abortion seen as a crime or a right

The correlation between the level of religious beliefs and the perspective on abortion procedure conducted on a fetus or a child

More than half of the respondents have opted for the main reason for abortion the appearance of medical problems to the child. Baby’s health represents the main concern of future mothers, and of each parent, and the birth of a child with serious health issues, is a factor which frightens any future parent, being many times, at least theoretically, one good reason for opting for abortion. At the opposite side, 12% of respondents would not choose abortion under any circumstances. Other reasons for which women would opt for an abortion are: if the woman would have a medical problem (22%) or would not want the child (10%) (Table ​ (Table12 12 ).

Potential reasons for carrying out an abortion

Most of the women want to give birth to a child, 56% of the respondents, representing also the reason that would determine them to keep the child. Morality (26%), faith (10%) or legal restrictions (4%), are the three other reasons for which women would not interrupt a pregnancy. Only 2% of the respondents have mentioned other reasons such as health or age.

A percentage of 23% of the surveyed people said that they have done an abortion so far, and 77% did not opted for a surgical intervention either because there was no need, or because they have kept the pregnancy (Table ​ (Table13 13 ).

Rate of abortion among women in the sample

Most respondents, 87% specified that they have carried out an abortion during the first 14 weeks – legally accepted limit for abortion: 43.6% have made abortion in the first four weeks, 39.1% between weeks 4–8, and 4.3% between weeks 8–14. It should be noted that 8.7% could not appreciate the pregnancy period in which they carried out abortion, by opting to answer with the option “ I don’t know ”, and a percentage of 4.3% refused to answer to this question.

Performing an abortion is based on many reasons, but the fact that the women have not wanted a child is the main reason mentioned by 47.8% of people surveyed, who have done minimum an abortion so far. Among the reasons for the interruption of pregnancy, it is also included: women with medical problems (13.3%), not the right time to be a mother (10.7%), age motivation (8.7%), due to medical problems of the child (4.3%), the lack of money (4.3%), family pressure (4.3%), partner/spouse did not wanted. A percentage of 3.3% of women had different reasons for abortion, as follows: age difference too large between children, career, marital status, etc. Asked later whether they regretted the abortion, a rate of 69.6% of women who said they had at least one abortion regret it (34.8% opted for “ Yes ”, and 34.8% said “ Yes, partially ”). 26.1% of surveyed women do not regret the choice to interrupted the pregnancy, and 4.3% chose to not answer this question. We noted that, for women who have already experienced abortion, the causes were more diverse than the grounds on which the previous question was asked: “What are the reasons that determined you to have an abortion?” (Table ​ (Table14 14 ).

The reasons that led the women in the sample to have an abortion

The majority of the respondents (37.5%) considered that “nervous depression” is the main consequence of abortion, followed by “insomnia and nightmares” (24.6%), “disorders in alimentation” and “affective disorders” (each for 7.7% of respondents), “deterioration of interpersonal relationships” and “the feeling of guilt”(for 6.3% of the respondents), “sexual disorders” and “panic attacks” (for 6.3% of the respondents) (Table ​ (Table15 15 ).

Opinion on the consequences of abortion

Over half of the respondents believe that abortion should be legal in certain circumstances, as currently provided by law, 39% say it should be always legal, and only 6% opted for the illegal option (Table ​ (Table16 16 ).

Opinion on the legal regulation of abortion

Although the current legislation does not punish pregnant women who interrupt pregnancy or intentionally injured their fetus, survey results indicate that 61% of women surveyed believe that the national law should punish the woman and only 28% agree with the current legislation (Table ​ (Table17 17 ).

Opinion on the possibility of punishing the woman who interrupts the course of pregnancy or injures the fetus

For the majority of the respondents (40.6%), the penalty provided by the current legislation, the imprisonment between six months and three years or a fine and deprivation of certain rights for the illegal abortion is considered fair, for a percentage of 39.6% the punishment is too small for 9.5% of the respondents is too high. Imprisonment between two and seven years and deprivation of certain rights for an abortion performed without the consent of the pregnant woman is considered too small for 65% of interviewees. Fourteen percent of them think it is fair and only 19% of respondents consider that Romanian legislation is too severe with people who commit such an act considering the punishment as too much. The imprisonment from three to 10 years and deprivation of certain rights for the facts described above, if an injury was caused to the woman, is considered to be too small for more than half of those included in the survey, 64% and almost 22% for nearly a quarter of them. Only 9% of the respondents mentioned that this legislative measure is too severe for such actions (Table ​ (Table18 18 ).

Opinion on the regulation of abortion of the Romanian Criminal Code (Art. 201)

Conclusions

After analyzing the results of the sociological research regarding abortion undertaken at national level, we see that 76% of the Romanian women accept abortion, indicating that the majority accepts only certain circumstances (a certain period after conception, for medical reasons, etc.). A percentage of 64% of the respondents indicated that they accept the idea of abortion after 14 weeks of pregnancy (for solid reasons or regardless the reason). This study shows that over 50% of Romanian women see abortion as a right of women but also a woman’s crime and believe that in the moment of interruption of a pregnancy, a fetus is aborted. Mostly, the association of abortion with crime and with the idea that a child is aborted is frequently found within very religious people. The main motivation for Romanian women in taking the decision not to perform an abortion is that they would want the child, and the main reason to perform an abortion is the child’s medical problems. However, it is noted that, in real situations, in which women have already done at least one abortion, most women resort to abortion because they did not want the child towards the hypothetical situation in which women felt that the main reason of abortion is a medical problem. Regarding the satisfaction with the current national legislation of the abortion, the situation is rather surprising. A significant percentage (61%) of respondents felt as necessary to punish the woman who performs an illegal abortion, although the legislation does not provide a punishment. On the other hand, satisfaction level to the penalties provided by law for various violations of the legal conditions for conducting abortion is low, on average only 25.5% of respondents are being satisfied with these, the majority (average 56.2%) considering the penalties as unsatisfactory. Understood as a social phenomenon, intensified by human vulnerabilities, of which the most obvious is accepting the comfort [ 48 ], abortion today is no longer, in Romanian society, from a legal or religious perspective, a problem. Perceptions on the legislative sanction, moral and religious will perpetual vary depending on beliefs, environment, education, etc. The only and the biggest social problem of Romania is truly represented by the steadily falling birth rate.

Conflict of interests

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

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Key facts about the abortion debate in America

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade – the decision that had guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years – has shifted the legal battle over abortion to the states, with some prohibiting the procedure and others moving to safeguard it.

As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

• Religion & Abortion

Carrie Blazina is a former digital producer at Pew Research Center .

Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many places, especially in europe, public opinion on abortion, americans overwhelmingly say access to ivf is a good thing, broad public support for legal abortion persists 2 years after dobbs, most popular.

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abortion , the expulsion of a fetus from the uterus before it has reached the stage of viability (in human beings, usually about the 20th week of gestation). An abortion may occur spontaneously, in which case it is also called a miscarriage , or it may be brought on purposefully, in which case it is often called an induced abortion.

Spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages, occur for many reasons, including disease, trauma, genetic defect, or biochemical incompatibility of mother and fetus. Occasionally a fetus dies in the uterus but fails to be expelled, a condition termed a missed abortion.

Induced abortions may be performed for reasons that fall into four general categories: to preserve the life or physical or mental well-being of the mother; to prevent the completion of a pregnancy that has resulted from rape or incest; to prevent the birth of a child with serious deformity, mental deficiency , or genetic abnormality; or to prevent a birth for social or economic reasons (such as the extreme youth of the pregnant female or the sorely strained resources of the family unit). By some definitions, abortions that are performed to preserve the well-being of the female or in cases of rape or incest are therapeutic, or justifiable, abortions.

Numerous medical techniques exist for performing abortions. During the first trimester (up to about 12 weeks after conception), endometrial aspiration , suction, or curettage may be used to remove the contents of the uterus. In endometrial aspiration, a thin flexible tube is inserted up the cervical canal (the neck of the womb) and then sucks out the lining of the uterus (the endometrium) by means of an electric pump.

In the related but slightly more onerous procedure known as dilatation and evacuation (also called suction curettage or vacuum curettage), the cervical canal is enlarged by the insertion of a series of metal dilators while the patient is under anesthesia , after which a rigid suction tube is inserted into the uterus to evacuate its contents. When, in place of suction, a thin metal tool called a curette is used to scrape (rather than vacuum out) the contents of the uterus, the procedure is called dilatation and curettage. When combined with dilatation, both evacuation and curettage can be used up to about the 16th week of pregnancy.

From 12 to 19 weeks the injection of a saline solution may be used to trigger uterine contractions; alternatively, the administration of prostaglandins by injection, suppository, or other method may be used to induce contractions, but these substances may cause severe side effects. Hysterotomy, the surgical removal of the uterine contents, may be used during the second trimester or later. In general, the more advanced the pregnancy, the greater the risk to the female of mortality or serious complications following an abortion.

In the late 20th century a new method of induced abortion was discovered that uses the drug RU-486 (mifepristone), an artificial steroid that is closely related to the contraceptive hormone norethnidrone. RU-486 works by blocking the action of the hormone progesterone, which is needed to support the development of a fertilized egg. When ingested within weeks of conception , RU-486 effectively triggers the menstrual cycle and flushes the fertilized egg out of the uterus. RU-486 is typically used in combination with another drug, misoprostol, which softens the cervix and induces uterine contractions. By 2020 the two-drug combination, commonly referred to as a “medication abortion” or the “abortion pill,” accounted for more than half of all abortions in the United States .

Whether and to what extent induced abortions should be permitted, encouraged, or severely repressed is a social issue that has divided theologians, philosophers, and legislators for centuries. Abortion was apparently a common and socially accepted method of family limitation in the Greco-Roman world. Although Christian theologians early and vehemently condemned abortion, the application of severe criminal sanctions to deter its practice became common only in the 19th century. In the 20th century such sanctions were modified in one way or another in various countries, beginning with the Soviet Union in 1920, with Scandinavian countries in the 1930s, and with Japan and several eastern European countries in the 1950s. In some countries the unavailability of birth control devices was a factor in the acceptance of abortion. In the late 20th century China used abortion on a large scale as part of its population control policy. In the early 21st century some jurisdictions with large Roman Catholic populations, such as Portugal and Mexico City , decriminalized abortion despite strong opposition from the church, while others, such as Nicaragua, increased restrictions on it.

A broad social movement for the relaxation or elimination of restrictions on abortion resulted in the passing of liberalized legislation in several states in the United States during the 1960s. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade (1973) that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion was unconstitutional, in effect legalizing abortion for any reason for women in the first three months of pregnancy. A countermovement for the restoration of strict control over the circumstances under which abortions might be permitted soon sprang up, and the issue became entangled in social and political conflict. In rulings in 1989 ( Webster v. Reproductive Health Services ) and 1992 ( Planned Parenthood v. Casey ), a more conservative Supreme Court upheld the legality of new state restrictions on abortion, though it proved unwilling to overturn Roe v. Wade itself. In 2007 the Court also upheld a federal ban on a rarely used abortion method known as intact dilation and evacuation. In a later ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the Court overturned both Roe and Casey , holding that there is no constitutional right to abortion. Following the Court’s decision in Dobbs , several states adopted new (or reinstated old) abortion restrictions or banned the procedure altogether.

In April 2023 a federal district court judge in Texas issued an order effectively invalidating the federal Food and Drug Administration ’s (FDA) approval of RU-486 in 2000. An approximately simultaneous order by a federal district court judge in Washington state prohibited the FDA from further limiting access to RU-486 in 17 states and the District of Columbia . Shortly after the two rulings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily blocked the Texas judge’s finding that RU-486 had been improperly approved but declined to reverse his separate stays of measures that the FDA had taken since 2016 to make RU-486 accessible to more patients, including extending the period during which the drug could be used from 7 to 10 weeks of pregnancy and permitting the drug to be mailed to patients rather than administered at an in-person visit with a doctor. The administration of Pres. Joe Biden then submitted an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, asking that it temporarily uphold the FDA’s approval of RU-486 and its measures since 2016 to make the drug more accessible. One week later the Supreme Court granted the administration’s request. In December 2023, following the Fifth Circuit’s decision in August upholding the district court’s invalidation of the FDA’s accessibility measures since 2016, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , the first major abortion-related case on its docket since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization . On June 13, 2024, the Court unanimously reversed and remanded the Fifth’s Circuit’s decision, holding that the original plaintiffs in the case—a group of pro-life medical associations and several individual doctors—lacked standing to sue .

The public debate of the abortion issue has demonstrated the enormous difficulties experienced by political institutions in grappling with the complex and ambiguous ethical problems raised by the question of abortion. Opponents of abortion, or of abortion for any reason other than to save the life of the mother, argue that there is no rational basis for distinguishing the fetus from a newborn infant; each is totally dependent and potentially a member of society, and each possesses a degree of humanity. Proponents of liberalized regulation of abortion hold that only a woman herself, rather than the state, has the right to manage her pregnancy and that the alternative to legal, medically supervised abortion is illegal and demonstrably dangerous, if not deadly, abortion.

UNBURDENED: Mary Ziegler on the fight for abortion freedoms

The legal historian on the threat to reproductive rights in every state, why kamala harris should act without fear of losing, and the future of the battle for women's rights in america.

Mary Ziegler, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, is among the most knowledgeable scholars of abortion and the law in the United States. She’s spent her career studying the evolution of reproductive rights and the threats to those rights, and as an author and commentator, she’s spent almost as long explaining the changing situation to American readers.

With abortion rights already removed, restricted or under serious threat across the U.S. in the post- Dobbs era, the Harris-Walz campaign has taken a far more aggressive stance in defense of abortion rights than any previous national Democratic campaign. Harris has also radically changed the Party’s language on abortion, not just placing it at the center of her messaging, but framing it in the context of the most basic American freedoms. 

To understand the Harris campaign’s strategy, what it might be doing better, and how it’s efforts might pay off in the short and long term, we reached out to Ziegler to understand the evolving legal battles around abortion at the federal level and in the states, and to get her take on Harris’s messaging and actions so far, to dig into the details what Harris has said as a candidate, and for some insight into what a President Harris might achieve, whether the election brings the worst-case scenario or the best.

UNBURDENED is The Ink’s interview series named after Vice President Harris’s catchphrase, where we ask some of the smartest policy minds out there to envision a bold, aggressive Harris agenda to materially improve people’s lives — unburdened by what has been.

Previously: Regulating A.I., featuring Sneha Revanur ; Relations with China, featuring Jane Perlez ; Border security, featuring former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson ; debt and education and economics, featuring Astra Taylor ; and foreign policy, featuring Matthew Duss

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

In a New York Times op-ed last month, you wrote that the Democrats still needed to do better on abortion rights . Do you think Kamala Harris has done enough to change that since? 

I think the challenge for the Democrats is to explain what could happen, what Donald Trump could do through executive power and has been avoiding discussing, in a way that’s not too technical and in the weeds for most Americans to understand. But the way Harris was talking about it at the convention and has been talking about it since has focused on how Donald Trump wants to have an abortion ban with or without Congress, which was a nod to the things Trump could do through executive power. And I think that's about as well as you can do with it. 

I still don't think there's been enough talk about what Trump judges could do, beyond what Trump judges have already done. But I do think there's been at least more of an effort to talk about executive power in a way that's relatable to voters. So even though I wrote what I wrote I do think it's been better.

And the Republicans have been trying to muddy the waters with complexity: “A ban? No, what ban? Well, what is a ban anyway? 15 weeks, 6 weeks? What does it matter? Comstock Act? Never heard of it.”

They just cite the statutory code in Project 2025. And they expect that most Americans don't know what the hell that means. 

And they’re not wrong.

It's true. They don't. In this kind of information environment. It is very difficult to talk about this issue, which is very personal and physical, and people can feel it.

What do you make of how Harris has been putting abortion in the frame of freedom, contextualizing the message on abortion rights as about freedom?

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Michelle Goldberg

It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Abortion Bans Killed Someone

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

It was inevitable, once Roe v. Wade was overturned and states started banning abortion, that women were going to die. Over the last two years, we’ve learned of countless close calls. In Oklahoma, 25-year-old Jaci Statton , sick and bleeding with a nonviable partial molar pregnancy, said medical staff told her to wait in a parking lot until she was “crashing” or on the verge of a heart attack. In Florida, Anya Cook was sent home from the hospital after her membranes ruptured at 16 weeks; she then nearly bled to death in the bathroom of a hair salon. Women in Texas and Louisiana have been denied treatment for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.

And now ProPublica has identified at least two women who died “after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care.” According to ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana, “There are almost certainly others.”

On Monday, thanks to Surana, we learned the story of one of those women, Amber Nicole Thurman, an otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant from Georgia with a 6-year-old son. In 2022, Thurman and her child had just moved out of her family’s place and into their own apartment, and she was planning to start nursing school. When she found out she was pregnant with twins, her best friend told ProPublica, she felt she needed an abortion to preserve her newfound stability, but Georgia had enacted a 6-week abortion ban, and she’d just passed the deadline.

She waited, hoping the law would be put on hold, but eventually she arranged babysitting, took time off from work and borrowed a car in order to get a surgical abortion in North Carolina. Though she and her best friend woke up at 4 a.m. for the drive, they hit terrible traffic on their way there. “The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect,” wrote Surana. It offered her a medication abortion instead.

Medication abortion is usually safe and effective, but in about 3 percent to 5 percent of cases, women end up needing either another dose of misoprostol, one of the two drugs in the regimen, or surgery. That’s what happened to Thurman. Days after taking her second pill, she was in pain and bleeding heavily. The clinic in North Carolina would have offered her free follow-up care, but it was too far away.

Eventually, suffering a severe infection, she passed out and ended up in a hospital in suburban Atlanta. She needed a D.&C., a procedure to empty the uterus, but doctors waited 20 hours to operate as her blood pressure sank, and her organs began to fail. According to Surana, Thurman’s last words to her mother were, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” A state medical review committee ruled her death “preventable.”

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Republicans block another vote on IVF protections as Harris makes it a 2024 issue

WASHINGTON — For the second time in four months, Senate Democrats forced a vote on the Right To IVF Act, only to be blocked by Republicans who called it unnecessary and politically motivated as Vice President Kamala Harris seeks to make access to in vitro fertilization a 2024 campaign issue .

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., forced the vote Tuesday after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump called himself "a leader on fertilization, IVF" at the recent debate with Harris and floated a vague plan to mandate that insurance companies or the government cover the treatment for free.

The vote was 51-44, falling short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster, with Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine again voting with Democrats in favor of the bill. All other GOP senators present voted against it.

The bill would establish broad protections and nationwide rights for individuals to access in vitro fertilization — or IVF — treatments and ensure that health providers can offer those services without restrictions or interference.

Harris, the Democratic nominee, said in the recent ABC debate that “under Donald Trump’s abortion bans, couples who pray and dream of having a family are being denied IVF treatments.”

Trump hit back, expressing his support for IVF and noting that the “very negative” Alabama Supreme Court ruling that threatened access to IVF treatment was overridden by the state Legislature .

Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., dismissed it as “another show vote” and vowed that “Republicans support IVF, full stop.”

“This is not an attempt to make law. This is not an attempt to get an outcome or to legislate,” Thune said. “This is simply an attempt by Democrats to try and create a political issue where there isn’t one.”

After the bill failed Tuesday, Harris said in a statement: “Every woman in every state must have reproductive freedom. Yet, Republicans in Congress have once again made clear that they will not protect access to the fertility treatments many couples need to fulfill their dream of having a child.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., the author of the bill, said she worries that laws could be passed in some states that would define “a fertilized egg as a human being” — as the Alabama Supreme Court did — “which then prevents IVF from being carried out.”

As the bill went down, Duckworth told NBC News that the path to passage is for Democrats to sweep the 2024 election and bring it back up in Congress. She predicted that Democrats would “ lift the filibuster ” to get around the 60-vote requirement, which would require 50 senators to vote to change the rules.

“I think it’s really important to families around the country to be able to start their families when they want to,” Duckworth said.

Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, did not vote Tuesday as he campaigns but accused Schumer of playing “political games.”

“President Trump and Senator Vance have made themselves crystal clear: They fully support guaranteed IVF access for every American family,” Vance spokeswoman, Taylor Van Kirk, said.

Republicans have offered a narrower bill , written by Sens. Katie Britt, R-Ala., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that would cut off Medicaid funding for states if they prohibit IVF. Democrats say the bill contains loopholes.

Sahil Kapur is a senior national political reporter for NBC News.

Frank Thorp V is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the Senate.

Kate Santaliz is an associate producer for NBC News’ Capitol Hill team.

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• September 17, 2024 Issue
• Young Surgeons: Submit Ess...

Young Surgeons: Submit Essays for History and Archives Committee Competition

September 17, 2024

The ACS History and Archives Committee offers a Young Surgeons Essay Competition that is intended to recognize and support young surgeons who are interested in the historical roots of the surgical profession and are dedicated to studying it. The objective is to produce a scholarly essay for publication using original historical research that will advance knowledge of the past, thus promoting both young surgeon historians and the history of surgery itself.

Young surgeons are invited to submit an essay on a historical topic of their choosing. The winner and runner up will be invited to publish their paper in a surgical journal, with publication costs covered, if accepted.

Entries are invited from young surgeons who must be the first and primary author.

Young surgeons are defined as:

• Fellows 45 or younger
• Associate Fellows 45 or younger
• Resident members
• Medical student members, who must be the first and primary author

Fellows older than 45 years of age may serve as additional or senior authors.

Submissions for the 2025 essay competition are now open, and the deadline to submit an entry is January 10, 2025. View the guidelines for the essay contest, including how and to whom to submit, and contact ACS Archivist Michael Beesley at [email protected]  for more information. 

In This Issue

Register Today for 2024 ACS Simulation in Surgical Education Course

Sign up for a chance to learn how simulation can teach and refine essential surgical skills; the course will take place November 13–16 in Dallas, TX.

Attend Academy Virtual Grand Rounds on the Learning Environment and Culture

Don't miss the Academy Virtual Grand Rounds this Thursday! Panelists will discuss learning culture in surgical education.

Mild TBI May Have Longer-Term Consequences on Cognitive Impairment

Listen to Dr. Mallory Jebbia discuss postdischarge cognitive impairment in certain brain injury patients.

Read about Evolving Management of Pancreatitis

Improving outcomes and quality of life for patients with pancreatitis may soon go beyond current approaches to include AI and genetic testing.

Learn Who Was Honored for Volunteerism and Humanitarian Efforts

ACS H.O.P.E. has announced the recipients of the 2024 ACS/Pfizer Surgical Volunteerism and Humanitarian Awards.

Register for New Traumatic Brain Injury Guidelines Course

The new course is for offers key recommendations in mortality reduction for clinicians committed to improving patient outcomes.

Participate in Hands-On Decision-Making and Ergonomics Clinics

The Surgical Metrics Project and the Surgical Ergonomics Clinic will return to the exhibit floor at this year’s Clinical Congress.

Second Victim Syndrome Must Be Addressed at Institutional Level, Article Suggests

Second victim syndrome can cause significant damage psychologically and adversely impact a clinician’s ability to provide patient care in the future.

Index Cholecystectomy for Acute Cholangitis Shows Better Outcomes versus Delayed

Acute cholangitis is a potentially life-threatening illness, and management is guided by the Tokyo Guidelines.

Intravenous Amino Acid Infusion May Reduce AKI Risk after Cardiac Surgery

Acute kidney injury is a significant complication following cardiac surgical procedures, due, in large part, to reduced renal perfusion.

Surgeons Discuss Recent Trends in Management of Acute Cholecystitis

Listen to Drs. Clancy Clark and Trang Nguyen discuss some of the latest trends in management of acute cholecystitis.