The surprising history of abortion in the United States | CNN

"In the 18th century and until about 1880, abortions were allowed under common law and widely practiced. They were illegal only after “quickening,” the highly subjective term used to describe when pregnant women could feel the fetus moving, Reagan said.

“At conception and the earliest stage of pregnancy, before quickening, no one believed that a human life existed; not even the Catholic Church took this view,” Reagan wrote. “Rather, the popular ethic regarding abortion and common law were grounded in the female experience of their own bodies.”

Though it is considered taboo in Christian traditions, until the mid-19th century, “the Catholic Church implicitly accepted early abortions prior to ensoulment,” she explained. “Not until 1869, at about the same time that abortion became politicized in this country, did the church condemn abortion; in 1895, it condemned therapeutic abortion,” meaning procedures to save a woman’s life.

Abortions would become criminalized by 1880, except when necessary to save a woman’s life, not at the urging of social or religious conservatives but under pressure from the medical establishment – and the very organization that today speaks out in support of abortion access, Reagan explained."

"Back when it (the American Medical Association) was still a fledgling organization, however, it began a crusade in 1857 to make abortion illegal, Reagan wrote. The impetus was manifold.

" Some of it came “out of regular physicians’ desire to win professional power, control medical practice, and restrict their competitors,” namely midwives and homeopaths.

But this was also a time, Reagan said, in which women were lobbying for entrance into Harvard Medical School, in part so they could pursue work in obstetrics and gynecology.

The force behind this 19th-century AMA anti-abortion campaign was Dr. Horatio Storer, a Harvard Medical School graduate who dedicated much of his practice to OB-GYN work before he died in 1922.

The crusade proved to be a form of backlash against the shifting aspirations of women. It was “antifeminist at its core,” Reagan wrote.

The AMA pushed for state laws to restrict abortions, and most did by 1880. Then the Comstock Law, passed by Congress in 1873, banned items including abortion drugs."

"But before abortions were banned, a woman known as Madame Restell ran abortion businesses from New York to Philadelphia and Boston. Her main clientele, Reagan wrote, were “married, white, native-born Protestant women of upper and middle classes.”

Abortions, birth control and general efforts to manage the timing of pregnancy meant birth rates among white women were falling just as immigrants streamed into the United States. And the idea of being out-populated by “others” worried some anti-abortion activists like Storer. He argued that whites should be populating the country, including the West and the South. Better them than blacks, Catholics, Mexicans, Chinese or Indians, he said, according to Reagan."