Abortion

Social and Legal History

Abortion, both legal and illegal, has long been part of life in the United States. Indeed, the legal status of abortion has passed through several distinct phases in U.S. history. Generally permitted at the nation's founding and for several decades thereafter, the procedure was made illegal under most circumstances in most states beginning in the mid-1800s.

[Page 6]Yet even after the procedure was criminalized, clandestine abortion continued to be common. It is estimated that during the 1950s and 1960s, a minimum of 200,000 women each year (some estimates go as high as 1.2 million) had illegal abortions, many of which were performed under unsafe conditions. As late as 1965, illegal abortions accounted for 17% of all officially reported pregnancy-related deaths.

Poor women and women of color and their families were disproportionately affected by the criminalization of abortion because even where abortion was illegal, women with financial means often had access to a safe procedure. Also, a woman could obtain a legal abortion by getting the approval of a hospital committee established to review abortion requests—an option generally available to only the well connected. A less affluent woman had few options aside from a dangerous illegal abortion. According to a series of studies on abortion in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s, the incidence of abortion was much higher among patients with private physicians than among women without their own doctors, and low-income women were more likely than more affluent women to be admitted to hospitals for postabortion care following an illegal abortion. Furthermore, one of every two childbirth-related deaths among non-White and Puerto Rican women in New York City during the 1950s was due to abortion, compared with one of every four among White women.

During the 1960s, states began reforming their strict antiabortion laws so that by the time the U.S. Supreme Court acted to make abortions legal nationwide in 1973, legal abortions were already available in seventeen states (home to four of every ten women ages 15–44 years) under a range of circumstances beyond those necessary to save a woman's life. In Roe v. Wade, the Court held that a woman's right to decide, in consultation with her physician, whether to obtain an abortion early in pregnancy is protected constitutionally. However, states may restrict or prohibit abortions entirely after fetal viability (i.e., the physician-determined point in a pregnancy when the fetus could survive outside the woman's body) unless an abortion is necessary to protect the woman's life or health.

...