Viewpoints: The imagined history of abortion laws | HeraldNet.com

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.

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