The Politics of Abortion

A brief history ...

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were all known to have suggested abortion. Even Hippocrates, who spoke against abortion because he feared injury to the woman, recommended it on occasion by prescribing violent exercises. Roman morality placed no social stigma on abortion.

Early Christians condemned abortion, but did not view the termination of a pregnancy to be an abortion before "ensoulment," the definition of when life began in the womb. Ensoulment was said to occur forty days after conception for a boy and eighty days after conception for a girl.

At the beginning of the 13th century, Pope Innocent III wrote that "quickening" -- the time when a woman first feels the fetus move within her -- was the moment at which abortion became homicide; prior to quickening, abortion was a less serious sin.

The tolerant approach to abortion which had prevailed in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries ended at the end of the nineteenth century. The change was seen by some as a means of countering the rising birth control movement, with its declining Catholic population. In Italy, during the years 1848 to 1870, the papal states shrank from almost one-third of the country to what is now Vatican City. It has been argued that the Pope's restriction on abortion was motivated by a need to strengthen the Church's spiritual control over its followers in the face of this declining political power.

From 1307 to 1803, abortion before quickening was not punished under English common law, and not regarded by society at large as a moral problem. Because most abortions took place before quickening, punishment was rare. Even if performed after quickening, the offense was usually considered a misdemeanour. This was the case until the nineteenth century; the entry of the state into the regulation of abortion has been relatively recent.

Abortion was not mentioned by the founders when drafting our Constitution, probably because it was legal at the time.

In the United States there is substantial evidence that suggests laws restricting abortion were not driven by prevailing public opinion. The strongest force behind the drive to criminalize abortion was the attempt by doctors to establish for themselves exclusive rights to practice medicine. They wanted to prevent "untrained" practitioners, including midwives, apothecaries, and homeopaths, from competing with them for patients and for patient fees.

The best way to accomplish their goal was to eliminate one of the principle procedures that kept these competitors in business. Rather than openly admitting to such motivations, the newly formed American Medical Association (AMA) argued that abortion was both immoral and dangerous. By 1910 all but one state had criminalized abortion except where necessary, in a doctor's judgment, to save the woman's life. In this way, legal abortion was successfully transformed into a "physicians-only" practice.

It has also been suggested that one of the motivations for anti-abortion laws, which varied from state to state, included fears that the population would be dominated by the children of newly arriving immigrants, whose birth rates tended to be higher than those of "native" Anglo-Saxon women.

The prohibition of legal abortion from the 1880s until 1973 came under the same anti-obscenity or Comstock laws that prohibited the dissemination of birth control information and services.

Criminalization of abortion did not reduce the numbers of women who sought abortions. In the years before Roe v. Wade, the estimates of illegal abortions ranged as high as 1.2 million per year. Although accurate records could not be kept, it is known that between the 1880s and 1973, many thousands of women were harmed as a result of illegal abortion.

In 1965 the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision struck down a state law that prohibited giving married people information, instruction, or medical advice on contraception. That was followed in 1972 by Eisenstadt v. Baird, a ruling that established the right of unmarried people to use contraceptives.

In 1973 the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade made it possible for women to get safe, legal abortions from well-trained medical practitioners. This led to dramatic decreases in pregnancy-related injury and death. It also launched the beginning of a sometimes violent anti-abortion movement.

Now, 33-years later, South Dakota has become the first state to enact sweeping anti-abortion restrictions -- and other states are lining up to follow suit.

And surprisingly, neither of the two major political parties have shown any interest in either supporting or opposing this trend. The Republican leadership seems to fear the loss of one of its biggest organizing tools, see "The GOP's Abortion Anxiety."

And the Democrats -- in their rush to become "Republican-lite" -- are not taking advantage of this opportunity to mobilize not only their base, but the nearly 60%* of Americans who think women should have a basic right to safe and legal abortion. (FOX New/Opinion Dynamics Poll, Feb. 28-March 1, 2006, of registered voters nationwide indicated 58% oppose SD ban, with +/- 3%)