Anti-abortion laws and race, class, and other demographic fears: the historical connection

[YoungDemCA]

I typed out a few fascinating excerpts from "Private Lives: Families, Individuals, and the Law" by Lawrence Meir Friedman, about the historical connection between anti-abortion laws and fears stemming from demographic (race, ethnicity, class, religion, national background) changes in the American population-who was having children, and who was not (or at least, at lower rates).

pp. 46-47

"It was in the late nineteenth century also that abortion became a serious criminal offense. Before 1860, some states did not regulate abortion at all. The public, and the law, also drew a sharp distinction between early abortion-abortion before "quickening" (the stage of pregnancy when the mother feels life stirring and moving)- and abortion later in the pregnancy. Thus, a Connecticut state, as of 1821, made it a crime to administer "any deadly poison...with an intention...to murder, or thereby to cause or procure the miscarriage of any woman, then being quick with child." But the situation changed after the middle of the century. Between 1860 and 1880, state after state passed laws restricting abortion or banning it altogether. Before this time, many abortionists plied their trade more or less openly....

pp. 47-48

"When abortion became illegal, this did not mean, of course, that no more abortions took place; they simply went underground. The situation in England, where abortion was illegal, was similar to that in the United States-abortion was common, clandestine, and dangerous. In both countries, abortion was taboo. The campaign against abortion may seem at first unrelated to laws regulating marriage; but in fact, the two were strongly related. It was widely believed that middle-class married women were shirking their duties as mothers and killing their unborn children. This belief fueled the drive against abortion and provided it with a good deal of its energy and bite.

A whirlwind of social change swept over the country in the late nineteenth century. A nation of farms and farmers was turning into a nation of factories, mines, and big business. The population was shifting from farms to towns, and from towns to cities. The cities themselves were growing dramatically. Vast numbers of immigrants were pouring into the country. These newcomers were different from the earlier immigrants. They came from southern and eastern Europe, not northern Europe, for the most part, and they were Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox, rather than Protestant. The old order seemed to be vanishing almost overnight. A kind of panic overtook respectable people of traditional American stock. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they worried about the joint effect of a falling birth rate and a rising tide of immigrants. Every ship that landed in New York harbor disgorged a cargo of hungry immigrants, who swarmed into the slums of New York and Chicago and Philadelphia; in time, they also produced a bumper crop of babies. Meanwhile, those women who were Americans of long standing, women of "good stock", were having fewer and fewer children. They used birth control (another sign of social decay); and, worst of all, they bought the "female pills that Madame Restell was selling, or the nostrums of other sellers; they took whatever measures they could in order to abort their unborn children. As one writer put it in 1874, abortion was one reason why there were so few "native-born children of American parents"; the country, he said, was "fast losing" its "national characteristics."

pp.48-49

"..the campaign (against abortion) was not solely a matter of religion or traditional moral values, important though those elements were. The state, in making abortion criminal, was trying to improve the bloodline of the population. It was trying to increase the crop of good, healthy, American babies-babies born to solid, respectable married women who were doing their duties as wives and mothers. Unless something was done, only inferior people, the dregs of society, along with the incredibly fertile immigrants, would make babies, and the nation would lose its soul, its energy, its moral fiber...

In the United States, the falling birthrate was so alarming among members of the middle class that this class almost seemed to be committing what Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 called "race suicide."

Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=kzrojQt2JbkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=private+lives+families+individuals+and+the+law&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9JZeVMHeGsmbigKi_4Ag&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=private%20lives%20families%20individuals%20and%20the%20law&f=false

[ismnotwasm]

1. Excellent

Looks like a great book

[YoungDemCA]

3. There is a rich body of literature on these issues

But it can be hard to find sometimes.

Glad to be of help.

[YoungDemCA]

2. Shameless self-kick

nt