page_title: Abortion in the United States
section_title: Rise of anti-abortion legislation
hierarchical_section_title: Abortion in the United States / History / Rise of anti-abortion legislation
context_page_description: Abortion is legal throughout the United States and its territories, although restrictions and accessibility vary from state to state. Abortion is a controversial and divisive issue in the society, culture and politics of the U.S., and various anti-abortion laws have been in force in each state since at least 1900. The Republican Party has generally sought to restrict abortion access or criminalize abortion, whereas the Democratic Party has defended access to abortion.
  Before the Supreme Court of the United States decisions of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decriminalized abortion nationwide in 1973, abortion was already legal in several states, but the decision in the former case imposed a uniform framework for state legislation on the subject. It established a minimal period during which abortion is legal. That basic framework, modified in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, remains nominally in place, although the effective availability of abortion varies significantly from state to state, as many counties have no abortion providers. Planned Parenthood v.
context_section_description: When the United States first became independent, most states applied English common law to abortion. This meant it was not permitted after quickening, or the start of fetal movements, usually felt 15–20 weeks after conception.
  Abortion has existed in America since European colonization. The earliest settlers would often encourage abortions before the "quickening" stage in the pregnancy. There were many reasons given for this, including not having resources to bear children. It was not until the late 1800s when states began to make abortions illegal. One reason given for the legislation was that abortions had been performed with dangerous methods and were often surgical. Because of this, many states decided to forbid abortions. As technology advanced and abortion methods improved, abortions still remained illegal. Women would resort to illegal unsafe methods, also known as "back alley" abortions. As of 2020, some women who live in areas with limited access to abortion clinics resort to these methods.
  Abortions became illegal by statute in Britain in 1803 with Lord Ellenborough's Act. Various anti-abortion statutes that codified or expanded common law began to appear in the United States in the 1820s. In 1821, a Connecticut law targeted apothecaries who sold "poisons" to women for purposes of inducing an abortion, and New York made post-quickening abortions a felony and pre-quickening abortions a misdemeanor in 1829. Other legal scholars have pointed out that some of the early laws punished not only the doctor or abortionist, but also the woman who hired them.
  A number of other factors likely played a role in the rise of anti-abortion laws. Physicians, who were the leading advocates of abortion criminalization laws, appear to have been motivated at least in part by advances in medical knowledge.  Science had discovered that conception inaugurated a more or less continuous process of development, which would produce a new human being if uninterrupted. Quickening was found to be neither more nor less crucial in the process of gestation than any other step. Many physicians concluded that if society considered it unjustifiable to terminate pregnancy after the fetus had quickened, and if quickening was a relatively unimportant step in the gestation process, then it was just as wrong to terminate a pregnancy before quickening as after quickening. Ideologically, the Hippocratic Oath and the medical mentality of that age to defend the value of human life as an absolute played a significant role in molding opinions about abortion. Doctors were also influenced by practical reasons to advocate anti-abortion laws. For one, abortion providers tended to be untrained and not members of medical societies. In an age where the leading doctors in the nation were attempting to standardize the medical profession, these "irregulars" were considered a nuisance to public health. The more formalized medical profession disliked the "irregulars" because they were competition, often at a cheaper cost.
  Despite campaigns to end the practice of abortion, abortifacient advertising was highly effective. Contemporary estimates of mid-19th century abortion rates suggest between 20% and 25% of all pregnancies in the United States during that era ended in abortion. This era saw a marked shift in those who were obtaining abortions. Before the start of the 19th century, most abortions were sought by unmarried women who had become pregnant out of wedlock. Out of 54 abortion cases published in American medical journals between 1839 and 1880, over half were sought by married women, and well over 60% of the married women already had at least one child. The sense that married women were now frequently obtaining abortions worried many conservative physicians, who were almost exclusively men. In the post-Civil War era, much of the blame was placed on the burgeoning women's rights movement.
  Though the medical profession expressed hostility toward feminism, many feminists of the era were also opposed to abortion. In The Revolution, operated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
caption: Abortion laws in the U.S. before Roe   Illegal (30)   Legal in case of rape (1)   Legal in case of danger to woman's health (2)   Legal in case of danger to woman's health, rape or incest, or likely damaged fetus (13)   Legal on request (4)[11]