Lina-Maria Murillo: Abortion in Iowa has Always Been Political

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in June gave states the right to determine how they want to regulate abortion – and even outlaw it all together. This has turned abortion into a hot button political issue for this upcoming midterm election for many races, including the U.S. Iowa senate race between Chuck Grassley and Mike Franken. IPR's Clay Masters spoke with University of Iowa gender, women’s sexuality studies and history professor Lina-Maria Murillo for some deeper historical and political context on abortion rights in Iowa.

“It's critical for people to understand how their views on abortion are being manipulated for political gain,” Murillo said.

Here are some of the key takeaways from Murillo’s interview:

The current ties of abortion to religion are 'quite new'

It might be hard to imagine that abortion has not always been such a political hot button in Iowa. Murillo says Iowa began restricting abortion in the mid-1800s along with other states.

By the end of the 1880s, Iowa and most other states in the nation had completely outlawed abortion access, unless deemed necessary by a physician. After all, physicians were at the head of the anti-abortion movement in the 1800s and making abortion a crime was about controlling women for a nationalist purpose.

“Basically, the origins of making abortion into a 'crime' at the end of the 19th century has nothing to do with religion,” Murillo said. “This current iteration that we see around access to abortion and its ties to religion are quite new.”

Throughout the early parts of the 20th century, most abortions were illegal and performed underground. Murillo says many underground abortion providers were themselves physicians and existed often in plain sight.

But, law enforcement, the courts, and public opinion let them work because people understood abortions were a fact of life. Murillo says there was a national moral panic after World War II, politicians and other moralists blamed easy access to abortion for women’s reluctance to return to the home. In the 1960s, this was no longer a feasible conversation as broader civil rights issues came to the national forefront.

In Iowa, pushes to liberalize abortion access in the late 20th century centered around overpopulation

“There's a group of public intellectuals and scientists, a lot of these folks are funded by what today we might call dark money, to suggest that there is a crisis on the hands of the world [and] there's just way too many people,” Murillo said, adding that it was directed mostly toward the so-called "developing world."

“This really becomes part of the national discourse, this fear of overpopulation. Through the war on poverty funds, through the Johnson administration, they create a population control committee,” Murillo said. “They start to give money for access to contraception. This is when the question of abortion takes on a different sort of route. People begin to think about access to abortion as part of a larger birth control regimen.”

Murillo says the root of many of these overpopulation concerns had to do with race and who was being born in Iowa. This is what influenced people politically, but this history is a touchy subject now.