From When Abortion Was a Crime to Abortion Is a Crime
The persistent conversation among doctors about abortion and their own practices and techniques of performing what they called “therapeutic abortion”— induced when the physician believed that pregnancy threatened the life or health of the woman is discovered.
Abstract
I began researching the history of abortion in the United States when I was in Judy Leavitt’s Women and Health class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Assigned a research paper, I suggested the 1960s abortion legalization movement. “That’s too recent,” Judy replied; she advised me to instead examine the medical literature for discussions of abortion. I went to the UW’s incredible medical library, where I used the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office to identify journal articles about abortion and then tracked them down in dozens of regional and specialist medical journals held by the library.1 In this first-year graduate seminar paper, I discovered the persistent conversation among doctors about abortion and their own practices and techniques of performing what they called “therapeutic abortion”— induced when the physician believed that pregnancy threatened the life or health of the woman. The medical literature included patient case studies, collective data, the introduction of new instruments, and discussion about when a therapeutic abortion was required. At one point I switched to colonial history, but one sleepless night of tossing and turning told me that I was not done researching abortion. I made it my dissertation topic. The threat to the legality of abortion posed by Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, while I was a college student, had turned me into an activist, so the topic mattered to me.