Not 1925: Texas' law banning abortion dates to before the Civil War

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

53% :Texas' efforts to regulate both childbirth and abortion coincided with a national effort started by a Boston doctor named Horatio Storer.
53% :Texas was still largely rural and law enforcement was informal and sparse.
50% : "There is good authority sustaining the proposition that to deliver a drug, poison or medicine to another for the purpose of being used for abortion is to administer the same."
49% :British common law, which governed the early United States, allowed abortion up to "quickening" or the point 15 to 20 weeks into pregnancy when a fetus can first be felt moving in the womb.
47% : This is part of why state laws regulating abortion often had an exception to save the life of the pregnant patient -- as determined by a doctor.
45% : In the five decades that these laws have been unenforceable, abortion has emerged as a central political hatchet, dividing the country along party and state lines.
43% : Now, after a reversal from the same court at the end of June, this frontier-era statute is once again the law of the land, leading to a near-total termination of abortion in Texas.
42% : Despite the longstanding legal restrictions on abortion, Texans still found ways to control their reproductive destinies, historians say.
42% : Storer and the American Medical Association pushed states to tighten their abortion laws, citing concerns over "unborn life" and women shirking their responsibilities as wives and mothers, said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian focusing on abortion at Florida State University College of Law.
42% : Roe v. Wade blocked not just Texas' statute but all state abortion bans, instead instituting a constitutional protection for abortion up to the point of viability, usually around 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy.
41% : The doctor who elicited this deathbed confession told law enforcement that "he did not think she was dying at the time, and he further said that her cries were caused by the pain she was suffering rather than from any calm, deliberate belief that death was impending."
41% :At times, illegal abortion operated in plain sight in Texas, largely unchecked -- and sometimes even aided -- by law enforcement, Murillo said.
41% : Therefore, there are now no laws in this State regulating abortion, per se."
38% : But Texas originated as a Spanish colony and then became part of independent Mexico, both of which prohibited abortion.
37% : By the time Texas joined the United States in 1846, though, the former British colonies were moving in the direction of their Spanish counterparts when it came to criminalizing abortion.
33% : But in late June, when the high court ruled on abortion, Attorney General Ken Paxton immediately issued an advisory, saying "abortion providers could be criminally liable for providing abortions starting today" under the pre-Roe statutes.
32% : In 1907, after that case and other legal challenges, the Legislature voted to add a definition of abortion to the law, declaring that the "fact that Article 641 of the Penal Code, which relates to the offense of abortion, does not define said offense, and is therefore inoperative, creates an emergency."

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.