Christine Stansell: A lost history of abortion
[Christine Stansell is the Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. She is writing a history of feminism. ]
... Often lost in the debate over D&X abortion is the fact that the procedure is exceedingly rare; in 2000, there were just 2,200 cases--or 0.17 percent of all abortions. The procedure is rare because it is used to end a pregnancy late in the second trimester or later, before viability, in a tiny number of cases when the woman's life is in danger. Abortions late in the second trimester are medically involved, potentially risky, painful, and emotionally difficult. So who waits that long?
The answer is simple: women and girls in states of duress. This includes teenagers who didn't realize they were pregnant, or kept hoping they weren't pregnant, or were too frightened to tell anyone and get help (a common plight of incest victims). It also includes women whose pregnancies have gone wrong, such as women found to be carrying fetuses with serious central nervous system anomalies like hydrocephaly.
Ironically, it was precisely women like these, caught in painful circumstances, who first prompted public awareness of the need to overhaul abortion law. Before Roe v. Wade, abortion was as widely practiced as it is today, an open secret despite being illegal everywhere. But, in the late '50s, medical professionals faced a public health crisis as the abortion rate soared and the woman hemorrhaging from botched procedures became a familiar presence in hospital emergency rooms. Reformers began by attacking laws that prevented women whose lives were threatened or who were pregnant as a result of rape or incest from getting abortions. They called for laws allowing "therapeutic" abortion in "hardship" cases to be authorized by a hospital physicians' committee. In the '60s, the idea of therapeutic abortions gained force, garnering support from liberal Protestants and Jews, lawyers, psychiatrists, and social workers. Small bands formed across the country to press the issue in state legislatures. Two panics about birth defects--the thalidomide scandal and a 1965 rubella epidemic--stirred up discussion about what it meant to a woman to give birth to a severely damaged child. The idea of urgent need expanded from a pregnancy that endangered a mother's life to one that endangered her mental health. By the late '60s, reformers had won laws for therapeutic abortion in a number of states.
Over the short run in the '60s, therapeutic abortion really only showed the urgent need for a much bigger change. The therapeutic "exception" never worked: Applications were few, because women were put off by the time-consuming and judgmental screening process before all-male physicians' panels, and most women didn't qualify, anyway. Committees strained to minimize the number of applications they approved, and there were horror stories of women denied--such as the woman confined to her bed by polio. And committees weren't the only problem. In one famous case, a middle-class African American woman from Long Island, pregnant with a rubella-scarred fetus, was approved for a therapeutic abortion but had the bad luck to fall into the hands of a fervent anti-abortion Catholic physician, who tricked her into believing the fetus was normal and sent her home.
But, in the long run, the push for therapeutic abortion made Americans of both sexes think publicly about what pregnancy meant to those most closely involved: the woman, her family, and the child who could be born unwanted. Considerations of how dire the circumstances of pregnancy were in hardship cases led to reflections about the hardships any pregnancy could cause. Large numbers of people--many of them well outside the radical politics of the decade--came to believe that the state should refrain from intruding into a decision that, in the end, was the pregnant woman's to make. In 1966, The Saturday Evening Post--as conventional as they came--ran the headline "we should legalize abortion," and The New York Times editorialized for legalization the next year. By 1970, there were initiatives in many state legislatures and a public that was leaning toward legalizing abortion, period.
It's interesting to note that D&X is used to end pregnancies in the kinds of situations in which there has long been a consensus that the woman's wishes should be honored. It's as if the anti-choice movement is going back to the '60s and trying for a do-over, dismantling the first premise on which most could agree--the right of a pregnant woman in a terrible bind to get a legal abortion from a competent physician, one who will put her health and safety first....
Read entire article at New Republic
... Often lost in the debate over D&X abortion is the fact that the procedure is exceedingly rare; in 2000, there were just 2,200 cases--or 0.17 percent of all abortions. The procedure is rare because it is used to end a pregnancy late in the second trimester or later, before viability, in a tiny number of cases when the woman's life is in danger. Abortions late in the second trimester are medically involved, potentially risky, painful, and emotionally difficult. So who waits that long?
The answer is simple: women and girls in states of duress. This includes teenagers who didn't realize they were pregnant, or kept hoping they weren't pregnant, or were too frightened to tell anyone and get help (a common plight of incest victims). It also includes women whose pregnancies have gone wrong, such as women found to be carrying fetuses with serious central nervous system anomalies like hydrocephaly.
Ironically, it was precisely women like these, caught in painful circumstances, who first prompted public awareness of the need to overhaul abortion law. Before Roe v. Wade, abortion was as widely practiced as it is today, an open secret despite being illegal everywhere. But, in the late '50s, medical professionals faced a public health crisis as the abortion rate soared and the woman hemorrhaging from botched procedures became a familiar presence in hospital emergency rooms. Reformers began by attacking laws that prevented women whose lives were threatened or who were pregnant as a result of rape or incest from getting abortions. They called for laws allowing "therapeutic" abortion in "hardship" cases to be authorized by a hospital physicians' committee. In the '60s, the idea of therapeutic abortions gained force, garnering support from liberal Protestants and Jews, lawyers, psychiatrists, and social workers. Small bands formed across the country to press the issue in state legislatures. Two panics about birth defects--the thalidomide scandal and a 1965 rubella epidemic--stirred up discussion about what it meant to a woman to give birth to a severely damaged child. The idea of urgent need expanded from a pregnancy that endangered a mother's life to one that endangered her mental health. By the late '60s, reformers had won laws for therapeutic abortion in a number of states.
Over the short run in the '60s, therapeutic abortion really only showed the urgent need for a much bigger change. The therapeutic "exception" never worked: Applications were few, because women were put off by the time-consuming and judgmental screening process before all-male physicians' panels, and most women didn't qualify, anyway. Committees strained to minimize the number of applications they approved, and there were horror stories of women denied--such as the woman confined to her bed by polio. And committees weren't the only problem. In one famous case, a middle-class African American woman from Long Island, pregnant with a rubella-scarred fetus, was approved for a therapeutic abortion but had the bad luck to fall into the hands of a fervent anti-abortion Catholic physician, who tricked her into believing the fetus was normal and sent her home.
But, in the long run, the push for therapeutic abortion made Americans of both sexes think publicly about what pregnancy meant to those most closely involved: the woman, her family, and the child who could be born unwanted. Considerations of how dire the circumstances of pregnancy were in hardship cases led to reflections about the hardships any pregnancy could cause. Large numbers of people--many of them well outside the radical politics of the decade--came to believe that the state should refrain from intruding into a decision that, in the end, was the pregnant woman's to make. In 1966, The Saturday Evening Post--as conventional as they came--ran the headline "we should legalize abortion," and The New York Times editorialized for legalization the next year. By 1970, there were initiatives in many state legislatures and a public that was leaning toward legalizing abortion, period.
It's interesting to note that D&X is used to end pregnancies in the kinds of situations in which there has long been a consensus that the woman's wishes should be honored. It's as if the anti-choice movement is going back to the '60s and trying for a do-over, dismantling the first premise on which most could agree--the right of a pregnant woman in a terrible bind to get a legal abortion from a competent physician, one who will put her health and safety first....