Women Have Always Had Abortions

Over the course of American history, women of all classes, races, ages and statuses have ended their pregnancies, both before there were any laws about abortion and after a raft of 19th-century laws restricted it. Our ignorance of this history, however, equips those in the anti-abortion movement with the power to create dangerous narratives. They peddle myths about the past where wayward women sought abortions out of desperation, pathetic victims of predatory abortionists. They wrongly argue that we have long thought about fetuses as people with rights. And they improperly frame Roe v. Wade as an anomaly, saying it liberalized a practice that Americans had always opposed.

But the historical record shows a far different set of conclusions.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, abortion was legal under common law before “quickening,” or when the pregnant woman could feel the fetus move, beginning around 16 weeks. The birth rate steadily dropped in the decades after the American Revolution, as couples sought to control the size of their families for a variety of reasons.

Abortion in the early stages of a pregnancy was common and generally not considered immoral or murderous. Along with breastfeeding, abstinence, the use of the rhythm method, vaginal douching and the use of herbs like pennyroyal or savin, which were believed to stimulate menstruation, abortion was considered part of the universe of what we now call “birth control.” By the 1820s, abortion services and contraceptive devices were advertised in newspapers with coded language.

1 | “Pennyroyal”

Pennyroyal was an herb that could induce abortion if taken in large doses. However it could cause permanent kidney and liver damage.

2 | “restoration of the menstural functions

when suppressed by any cause”

The ad promises, through the heavy-handed “BY ANY CAUSE,” to bring a woman’s period back.

3 | “care should be taken not to use them in pregnancy

as they would be sure to cause a miscarriage”

Warnings like this made clear they could be abortifacients.

4 | “a sealed plain wrapper”

Nondescript packaging provided discretion.

ADVERTISEMENT from 1894

1 | “Pennyroyal”

Pennyroyal was an herb that could induce abortion if taken in large doses. However it could cause permanent kidney and liver damage.

2 | “restoration of the menstural functions when suppressed by any

cause”

The ad promises, through the heavy-handed “BY ANY CAUSE,” to bring a woman’s period back.

3 | “care should be taken not to use them in pregnancy as they would be

sure to cause a miscarriage”

Warnings like this made clear they could be abortifacients.

4 | “a sealed plain wrapper”

Nondescript packaging provided discretion.

ADVERTISEMENT from 1894

1 | “Pennyroyal”

Pennyroyal was an herb that could induce abortion if taken in large doses. However it could cause permanent kidney and liver damage.

2 | “restoration of the menstural functions when suppressed by any cause”

The ad promises, through the heavy-handed “BY ANY CAUSE,” to bring a woman’s period back.

3 | “care should be taken not to use them in pregnancy as they would be sure to cause a miscarriage”

Warnings like this made clear they could be abortifacients.

4 | “a sealed plain wrapper”

Nondescript packaging provided discretion.

ADVERTISEMENT from 1894

1 | “Madame Restell”

Madame Restell was known for performing abortions in New York in the 19th century.

2 | “removal of all special irregularities

and obstructions in females.”

General terms like “removal” signaled advertisements for surgical or induced abortions. When referring to a fetus, if “special irregularities” was too vague, additional language like “obstructions” could add clarity.

ADVERTISEMENT from 1865

ADVERTISEMENT from 1865

1 | “Madame Restell”

Madame Restell was known for performing abortions in New York in the 19th century.

2 | “removal of all special irregularities

and obstructions in females.”

General terms like “removal” signaled advertisements for surgical or induced abortions. When referring to a fetus, if “special irregularities” was too vague, additional language like “obstructions” could add clarity.

ADVERTISEMENT from 1865

1 | “Madame Restell”

Madame Restell was known for performing abortions in New York in the 19th century.

2 | “removal of all special irregularities

and obstructions in females.”

General terms like “removal” signaled

advertisements for surgical or induced abortions.

When referring to a fetus, if “special irregularities” was too vague, additional language

like “obstructions” could add clarity.

Although 19th-century contraceptive and abortion practices were largely unregulated and often dangerous, the ubiquity of the advertisements indicates just how necessary women found them. They also talked about family planning in private diaries and letters, as well as in public lectures and tracts, using different words, of course. But the conversations were omnipresent.

Most women’s rights activists in the 1800s did not openly embrace contraceptives or abortion as part of their national platform. They knew that doing so would have increased men’s sexual access to women, while allowing them to escape responsibility for any consequences. Instead, reformers promoted “voluntary motherhood,” the right of women to refuse their husbands’ sexual demands and the right to bear children only when they felt ready. Reformers knew that women’s right to bodily integrity, above even the right to vote, was the key to truly becoming full citizens.

Beginning in the 1850s, however, the crusade against abortion began in earnest. Physicians, in trying to persuade legislators to criminalize abortion and birth control, sought to solidify their professional expertise. In an era where American medicine was rife with “irregular” and untrained practitioners, many viewed anti-abortion reform as the key to improving the public’s perceptions of physicians and establishing their place as respected members of society.

Some of their arguments focused on the “rights of the unborn,” a view at odds with much of public sentiment at the time, and also with the Massachusetts Supreme Court. It ruled in Dietrich v. Northampton that fetuses who died before they could live separate from their mother were not persons as recognized by the courts. Additionally, physicians were worried about the threat of “race suicide” if white, native-born women continued to shirk their motherly duties.

Even the Journal of the American Medical Association noted, “the means employed to prevent conception, and the practice of criminal abortion, are not committed by the Jews and Catholics to anything like the degree that they obtain among the Protestants.” American physicians drew on nativist and anti-immigrant fears to argue that the “ignorant, the low-lived and the alien” would outbreed good, Protestant Americans and destroy the nation.

By 1900 most states had passed laws restricting abortion or contraception. The Comstock law, passed in 1873, had also classified contraception and abortion information and advertising as legal obscenity for much of the next century. This law banned the mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy” material through the Postal Service. That meant that advertising abortifacients, abortion services or contraceptives could land people in prison or saddle them with high fines. Of course, women still sought to control their fertility. Information and devices to control reproduction simply became harder to obtain and were shrouded in shame and secrecy, increasing the danger to women who sought underground methods.

And seek underground methods they did. Medical journals during this era were full of carefully recorded cases involving descriptions of women’s perforated and infected uteruses, and the grim and often fatal consequences of chemical douches and injections.

1 | “The one intimate neglect that can

engulf you in marital grief.”

A vague reference to the “one intimate neglect” implies that it was a wife’s responsibility to deal with things like birth control in private.

2 | “feminine hygiene”

Andrea Tone, a historian and the author of

“Device and Desires,” writes that terms like

“feminine hygiene” were ways to reference birth

control in coded language.

3 | “Germs destroyed swiftly”

“Germs” refers to sperm.

4 | “protect your married happiness”

The ad threatens women who don’t use Lysol with marital insecurity — including unwanted pregnancies.

ADVERTISEMENT FROM THE 1940s

1 | “The one intimate neglect that can engulf you in

marital grief.”

A vague reference to the “one intimate neglect” implies that it was a wife’s responsibility to deal with things like birth control in private.

2 | “feminine hygiene”

Andrea Tone, a historian and the author of

“Device and Desires,” writes that the terms

“feminine hygiene” were ways to reference birth

control in coded language.

3 | “Germs destroyed swiftly”

“Germs” refers to sperm.

4 | “protect your married happiness”

The ad threatens women who don’t use Lysol with marital insecurity — including unwanted pregnancies.

ADVERTISEMENT FROM THE 1940s

1 | “The one intimate neglect that can engulf you in marital grief.”

A vague reference to the “one intimate neglect” implies that it was a wife’s responsibility to deal with things like birth control in private.

2 | “feminine hygiene”

Andrea Tone, a historian and the author of “Device and Desires,” writes that terms like “feminine hygiene” were ways to reference birth control in coded language.

3 | “Germs destroyed swiftly”

“Germs” refers to sperm.

4 | “protect your married happiness”

The ad threatens women who don’t use Lysol with marital insecurity — including unwanted pregnancies.

ADVERTISEMENT FROM THE 1940s

In the late 1920s, the Children’s Bureau found that illegal abortions accounted for at least 11 percent of all maternal deaths. By the 1930s, one physician estimated that there were at least 681,000 abortions per year in the United States, resulting in the deaths of 8,000 to 10,000 women.

The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade allowed women to choose to have an abortion under some circumstances. The decision stated that during the first trimester of pregnancy, a state could not restrict abortion access, merely legalizing what had been happening all along. In the years after the ruling, the number of legal abortions increased to over one million procedures per year. The mortality rate dropped significantly, from about 70 patient deaths per 100,000 cases before the ruling to 1.3 after the decision. It has now become statistically safer to obtain an abortion in the United States than it is to undergo pregnancy or give birth.

Scholars have worked tirelessly to uncover this long history and make sense of it. Nevertheless, false histories of abortion dominate contemporary politics, selling Americans on a past that never existed and creating the possibility of a future that has no precedent. It is a world where somehow no one will ever try to end her pregnancy. But it’s worth taking a close look at the historical record because it tells us one thing over and over and over. Regardless of whether abortion was legal, or how many people believed fetuses had rights or what physicians thought or anything else really, women have always had abortions.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the court that ruled in Dietrich v. Northampton. It was the Massachusetts Supreme Court, not the Supreme Court.