A demonstration outside the U.S. Supreme Court on March 4, 2020, as the Court heard oral arguments inWhen I recently asked students in my introductory gender and sexuality studies course how long they thought abortions have been practiced in American history, one earnestly volunteered, “The 1950s.” My student is in good company. It’s been five months since Justice Samuel Alito released the majority opinion in was not only “egregiously wrong,” but was a historical aberration.
” in the K-12 classroom, historians have a special obligation to challenge the Supreme Court’s narrow view of this history.is so well-documented that even a cursory study reveals that this history is anything but brief. Humans have been trying to control if, how and when they give birth for literally thousands of yearsand Americans are no exception. Even if we only begin our search for the history of abortion after the American Revolution, we readily find evidence that disputes Alito’s claim.
Until criminalization, early abortions were legal under common law. Early abortions were generally defined as those occurring beforethe point at which a pregnant person could feel a fetus move, approximately three to four months, but sometimes longer. Neither a physician nor a midwife could make this determination; only the pregnant person could say at which point quickening occurred. —and not all states criminalized abortions until 1880, approximately a century after our nation’s founding.
Good! Let's hope they do it!