Abortion , Race , and Gender in Nineteenth - Century America

launched a successful campaign to criminalize abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Virtually every state had passed laws criminalizing abortion by 1890, and most gave physicians authority to decide when abortion was medically necessary (Mohr 1978; Luker 1984).1 Many of these laws remained unchanged until vacated by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Most historians of abortion assert that nineteenth-century abortion politics concerned gender relations—specifically, that physicians argued for the passage of anti-abortion laws by asserting that society was damaged by women’s refusal of motherhood. Physicians addressed men’s fears of women’s changing social roles, in particular, of suffragists’demand for women’s right to a place in the public sphere (Brodie 1994; Smith-Rosenberg 1985). Thus the current historiography concludes that nineteenth-century abortion politics concerned control of women’s bodies and the meaning of motherhood in defining women’s social place. We argue that the nineteenth-century politics of abortion were simultaneously racial and genAbortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America