New Jersey

Abortion and Maternal and Infant Mortality

In 2005, the abortion rate was 34.3 per 1,000 women of reproductive age; 30 percent of pregnancies that year ended in induced abortions. Two metropolitan areas and 19 percent of New Jersey counties lack an abortion provider. The maternal mortality rate in the state is currently low, but only after much campaigning to spend more money on midwifery and other medical care for birthing mothers. Prior to this, many women died in the early 20th century through childbirth, including the medical historian Cecilia Charlotte Asper Mettler (1909–43), who died three days after giving birth to her daughter. To pay for the improved health care system as well as educational services, during the 1940s Jersey City had the highest local taxes in the entire United States. New Jersey had been one of the earlier states to introduce compulsory education, which was established in 1875 for all children from the age of 6 to 16. In 2008, 60.2 percent of women in New Jersey were in the civilian labor force.

Even as recently as the late 19th century, infant mortality was common. Rev. Richard Felix Cleveland and Anne Neal Cleveland at Caldwell had nine children, all of whom survived into at least their 30s. Richard died when the youngest was only 7 years old; the fifth child, born in 1837, was Grover Cleveland, later U.S. president. Mary Helen Crane, the wife of the Rev. Jonathan Townley Crane, had already lost her first four children before their first birthday, before her fifth son, Stephen Crane, was born in 1871 at Newark. Mary looked after her infant at home until he was 8 years old, as he was too delicate to go to school until then. In the following year his father died, and his mother had to bring up the boy in a boarding house near Newark; he later became famous as the author of the book The Red Badge of Courage (1895).

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