Exploring the complicated history of abortion in the United States

Judy Woodruff:

In the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito writes that the nation has a — quote — "unbroken tradition" of criminalizing abortion.

But, as John Yang reports, the history is actually much more complicated.

John Yang:

For almost a half-century, scenes like this have become nearly routine outside women's health clinics around the country.

Protesters:

Stop murdering your baby. Please, let us help you.

Protesters:

Roe v. Wade has got to go, hey, hey, ho, ho!

John Yang:

In the nation's capital, supporters on each side of the abortion divide made their voices heard.

Protesters:

Pro-family! Pro-choice!

John Yang:

But in the country's earliest years, abortion was not against the law.

Michele Goodwin, Author, "Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood": Indigenous people had been performing all manner of health care, abortions, helping people carry pregnancies to terms. The Pilgrims were performing abortions.

John Yang:

Michele Goodwin is a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Michele Goodwin:

Abortion becomes a controversial issue that is ripe then for legislative debate close to the time of the Civil War.

And it's at a time in which males are getting involved in reproduction. Prior to that time, nearly 100 percent of women's reproductive health care had all been done by women and had been done by midwives.

John Yang:

Midwives who helped deliver babies also helped women terminate pregnancies.

Jennifer Holland is a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma.

Jennifer Holland, University of Oklahoma: And in English common law, abortions were illegal before something called quickening, which is when woman felt a fetus move, somewhere between the fourth and sixth month of pregnancy.

And all abortions before that were legal. And only after that were they illegal.

John Yang:

Women could find ways to terminate pregnancies in the pages of their newspapers. Ads promoted products with shrewdly disguised names like Dr. Vandenburgh's Female Renovating Pills or services like those Madame Costello provided for ladies "who wish to be treated for obstruction of their monthly periods."

In New York, Madame Restell was considered a heroine to her patients, but demonized in the press, labeled "The Abortionist of Fifth Avenue." Her business success spawned copycats in other cities.

In 1847, a group of white men formed the American Medical Association. They pushed for laws to make abortion illegal in an effort to put midwives like Madame Restell out of business. The effort to outlaw abortion was also driven by a growing fear of foreign nonwhite immigration and declining birth rates among white Protestants.

Michele Goodwin:

It was deeply racial, tying into the fact that the nation was soon to be at war and that there were tensions that were already building, with abolitionists saying, these are horrible things that we see taking place in the antebellum South.

And so they connected a racist impact to that too, saying that white women needed to use their loins and go north, south, east and west because of the potential browning of America.

John Yang:

Between the end of the Civil War in 1910, abortion was banned in all the states, except in cases where either the life of the mother or the viability of the fetus was at risk. But abortion was still practice in secret.

Late 19th century observers estimated that, each year, there were two million abortions. And, in 1930, one-fifth of recorded maternal deaths were from these unsafe illegal procedures often called back alley abortions. They have been portrayed in popular culture, here in the film "Dirty Dancing," which was set in 1963.

Actor:

He didn't use no ether, nothing.

Jennifer Grey, Actress:

I thought you said he was a M.D.

Actor:

The guy had dirty knife and a folding table. I could hear her screaming in the hallway. And I swear to God, Johnny, I tried to get in. I tried.

John Yang:

Attitudes toward abortion began to shift in the 1960s. One example, the highly publicized case of Sherri Chessen Finkbine, the host of a popular children's TV show.

She feared her developing fetus was damaged as a result of taking thalidomide for morning sickness. She went to Sweden for an abortion because it was illegal in the United States. At the time, a Gallup poll showed 52 percent of Americans said she did the right thing.

Jennifer Holland:

In the mid-'60s, you have this reform movement grow up. And clergy were really outspoken in this particular reform movement. And it's this group of clergy from all different denominations, Jewish, Protestant. And they counseled women about abortion, and helped them seek abortions, and not only that, but then the clergy would testify about their actions in the state legislatures. So they were openly breaking the law.

John Yang:

Another group based in Chicago, the Jane Collective, worked underground to help thousands of women obtain abortions between 1969 and 1973.

The push for abortion rights also became more visible, and pressure was on to liberalize abortion laws.

Woman:

We're here because we were not allowed to testify to this all-male committee who's deciding what should happen to our bodies and our lives.

John Yang:

Hawaii, New York, Alaska and Washington state were the first to legalize abortion access for women in 1970. Then, in January 1973, the Supreme Court announced its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion nationwide.

Michele Goodwin:

These are justices that are looking at the American landscape and finding that abortions have not stopped. There are people who are discovering women in motel rooms dying or dead on top of sheets and towels, women being found on kitchen tables having tried to self-manage an abortion because it's been made criminalized.

John Yang:

The Roe v. Wade ruling fueled a movement against abortion. Groups staged marches and sit-ins across the country in protest.

Jennifer Holland:

Catholics and evangelicals and also Mormons, they fundamentally disagreed, not only disagreed about theology, but believed they — each of them believed that they had the monopoly on religious truth.

But they really are able to link themselves through abortion politics, and saying that they are linked by something called Judeo-Christian values, which the anti-abortion movement resuscitates as an idea in the '70s to sort of cover this idea that all Christians, of course, oppose abortion, and they always have. And, of course, that was a manufactured idea of this movement, because religious people had been very openly supporting abortion, and very recently.

And they knew that wasn't true. In the late '70s, '80s and '90s, you have Republicans acknowledge the power of this voting base. The movement has been incredibly good at developing a constituency for whom no other issue matters. Not any other issue matters as much as this issue.

John Yang:

In those same decades, some took their beliefs to an extreme, using violence, including bombings, arsons, and even murders of abortion providers.

Michele Goodwin:

That is a real threat that continues to exist, not on the scale that it was, though, in the 1980s.

This is now a political movement, and not just something that is simply in the streets. There is a kind of political movement that has taken, that has galvanized, picked up steam, and been able to win victories both at the state legislative level and also in American courts.

Jennifer Holland:

I think both Donald Trump and these very fervent state legislatures — legislators who believe very deeply on this issue are really a product of the power of this movement.

John Yang:

It's an issue that's become one of the most divisive of the day.

Outside the Supreme Court, protests continue, as the country awaits the court's final decision.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm John Yang.