Viewpoints: The imagined history of abortion laws | HeraldNet.com
- Bias Rating
-12% Somewhat Liberal
- Reliability
N/AN/A
- Policy Leaning
100% Very Conservative
- Politician Portrayal
-21% Negative
Continue For Free
Create your free account to see the in-depth bias analytics and more.
Continue
Continue
By creating an account, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy, and subscribe to email updates. Already a member: Log inBias Score Analysis
The A.I. bias rating includes policy and politician portrayal leanings based on the author’s tone found in the article using machine learning. 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.
Sentiments
N/A
- Conservative
Sentence | Sentiment | Bias |
---|---|---|
Unlock this feature by upgrading to the Pro plan. |
Reliability Score Analysis
Policy Leaning Analysis
Politician Portrayal Analysis
Bias Meter
Extremely
Liberal
Very
Liberal
Moderately
Liberal
Somewhat Liberal
Center
Somewhat Conservative
Moderately
Conservative
Very
Conservative
Extremely
Conservative
-100%
Liberal
100%
Conservative
Contributing sentiments towards policy:
50% : The 'quickening' standard: Anglo-American common law initially guided the U.S. on abortion.48% : A collection of 225 newspaper reports about abortion in nationally distributed news articles from 1820 to 1860 shows a trickle of stories up to 1845, followed by a dramatic acceleration thereafter.
47% : Abortion was in the news as never before.
43% : Under common law, abortion was only punishable after "quickening," defined as the moment the mother first felt fetal movement; typically between 16 to 22 weeks of gestation.
40% : Writing for the majority in Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. argues that Roe disrupted "an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment" that had "persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973."
38% : Before states began criminalizing abortion in the 19th century, and even after, respectable doctors and midwives performed abortions, with the practice usually only visible to the public when a patient died.
36% : Few abortion providers were convicted under the new laws, indicating that most Americans didn't see abortion as a crime.
36% : And there is little evidence that criminalizing abortion made a dent in its actual practice.
35% : Alito contends, however, that pre-quickened abortions were always strongly condemned, as shown by the wave of statutes that states passed in the 19th century criminalizing abortion for the entire pregnancy.
34% : Even as states clamped down on abortion, public sentiment failed to keep up.
34% : Their opening report garnered skepticism, with one critic concluding, these doctors "will fail to convince the public that abortion in the early months is a crime, and a large proportion of the medical profession will tacitly support the popular view of the subject."
33% : This advocacy drove most states that had not yet enacted new abortion statutes to do so in the 1860s and 1870s; laws that criminalized abortion before quickening.
33% : None of this supports the idea of an unbroken tradition of preventing abortion and morally condemning it.
32% : These resulted from the work of a group of white male doctors in Boston who were convinced that "among the married the crime [of abortion] seems even more common than among those who have the excuse of shame."
17% : An imagined past: But a small, elite group of wWhite male doctors leading the charge to criminalize abortion is hardly evidence of widespread support for making abortion illegal.
*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.