People have always had abortions
The desire to control your own reproductive health is natural, ancient and good.
When the US Supreme Court reversed Roe V. Wade in June 2022, Justice Samuel Alito justified ending half a century of protection for the right to an abortion thusly: “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” Basically, the constitution doesn’t mention abortion. The constitution of course fails to mention many things, like the autonomy of women and people of color, or the existence of TikTok, or your right to buy an AR-15 or eat a banana. The difference, Alito is arguing, is that your right to eat a tropical fruit or procure an assault weapon is implied, while the right to terminate a pregnancy isn’t. Thankfully, I’m not a constitutional scholar. But I am someone who collects weird facts about sex for a living. And here’s an inconvenient truth for Alito: His claim that the US had “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment… from the earliest days of the common law until 1973” would probably have confused the founding fathers about as much as the latest TikTok dance.
Abortion is old. Egyptian medical papyri mentioned methods for terminated unwanted pregnancy more than 3,000 years ago. While some ancient texts describe legal punishments, analysis suggests that these cases were punishing women for ending pregnancies without their husbands’ permission. (Which, to be clear, sucks butt, but isn’t the same thing as vehemently opposing all abortion, especially with historical and cultural context.)
When ethnologist George Devereux sought to compile all existing written accounts of abortion in pre-industrial societies, he concluded that “abortion is an absolutely universal phenomenon, and that it is impossible even to construct an imaginary social system in which no woman would ever feel at least impelled to abort.” (He also had cheekbones that could cut glass.) Even as Christianity spread and began to influence official stances on abortion, medical texts and writing produced by and for everyday women shows that terminations remained common.
I’m not trying to get you to believe that human history is packed with free abortions on every street corner and pro-abortion parades—it’s not—but that’s not the point. Even in times and places where abortion was shameful, taboo, or even technically-not-allowed, it happened a lot and was pretty much the pregnant person’s own damn business.
But yeah, sure, something being probably pretty normal for most of recorded human history doesn’t mean it was ever legally acceptable in America. Lest we forget that this land existed before people planted flags in it: various groups of Indigenous people living in what we now call North America before European colonization definitely took steps to control reproduction and end unwanted pregnancy. But I digress.
Let’s circle back to Alito’s claim that abortion was prohbited “on pain of criminal punishment” way back in “the earliest days of common law.” Again, I’m not a constitutional scholar. But I’m pretty sure that Supreme Court Justices are supposed to be? So it’s a little embarrassing that this claim is so easy to debunk.
In fact, under colonial common law, abortions were only punishable as misdemeanors after “the quickening,” when a pregnant person reported feeling the movement of their fetus. You could make the argument (and many anti-abortion advocates do) that this means people simply didn’t realize there was a fetus in there before it started kicking, and so had no way of conceptualizing early abortions as abortions. While it’s true that the way people understood gestation was fundamentally different, the fact remains that this distinction—and the fact that it hinged on a super subjective cutoff point—meant most pregnant people had the time and ability to end a pregnancy if they wanted to (unlike the so-called “heartbeat bills” that offer a paltry pseudoscientific compromise to total abortion bans today).
It was tacitly understood, from a legal standpoint, that emptying one's uterus was a pretty private matter. Even from a social and religious standpoint, most of the stigma around abortion had more to do with the potential reasons one needed it, like infidelity or premarital sex. And most of the legal prosecutions of abortion we know about in early US history came about because someone died during the process, or someone was selling poison as an abortificant.
This began to change in the 19th century, when the growing formal bodies of science and medicine cast womens’ authority over the particulars of gestation as unscientific, and governments began to cast reproduction as a national moral imperative. In 1857, obstetrician and gynecologist Horatio Robinson Storer began a public campaign to make all abortion illegal. Many historians now argue that, whatever Storer’s personal motivations were, his allies in the American Medical Association were largely hoping to yank away control of reproductive health from midwives and other folk practitioners. They succeeded within just a few decades.
Abortions did not stop happening, which is pretty unsurprising when you remember that people have been performing them and seeking them out for thousands of years. What had once been a private and personal matter simply became a secret and dangerous one. Now, even the indisputably safe, indisputably private process of inducing a medication abortion at home is under attack.
For thousands of years, people have been having abortions. It’s probably also true that, for as long as people have terminated pregnancies, there have been some people who thought they shouldn’t. But a clear and honest read of our species’ history—and that of our country—shows that, in most circumstances, those people could, legally speaking, go suck an egg about it. Putting protection for abortion into the early legal documents of our nation would have made about as much sense as codifying protection for taking laxatives. What is new, unnatural, and immoral is not the desire for reproductive control; it's the desire of the state to control reproduction.
Rachel’s Recs:
Read: A gosh dang audiobook. I really like this one, which is basically Daisy Jones and the Six combined with The Haunting of Hill House.
Watch: My silly little TikToks about silly little abortion laws.
Buy: My chaotically mediocre art prints and t-shirts.
Live: Deliciously.