I saw a tweet recently that claimed that a historian studying abortion concluded that the number of abortions performed after Roe v Wade was lower than the number performed before. The rationale was that, knowing she could get an abortion in the first trimester without too much trouble, allowed a pregnant woman to spend some time making a decision instead of going into panic mode and rushing to get the procedure.
Frankly, I don’t buy the rationale. But I am curious about how many abortions happened before Roe v Wade, or really before some states legalized the procedure. (I’m old enough to remember when every young woman had an idea of how much a trip to New York would cost, including the doctor’s fees. I’m reasonably certain that before that women had at least a vague idea who they might contact to set them up.)
It has long seemed to me that the anti-choice community has glossed over the fact that the discontinuation of legal abortions does not mean that abortion will no longer occur in the US.
So, can someone link me to a reliable study that estimates what the prevalence of abortion was in years past?
“HAUGEBERG: Scholars will probably never be able to answer that question with precision precisely because the procedure was illegal. But scholars estimate that between 20% and 25% of all pregnancies ended in abortion before Roe v. Wade.”
Another thing to consider is that some doctors would simply do a D & C to clean out the uterus, and write it up as routine care, instead of acknowledging an abortion took place.
I’ve looked into this previously and do not really believe, as @AskNott says, there is a definitive answer. There is absolutely some scholarship which suggests that it is possible more pregnancies at least in some years, ended in abortion prior to Roe v Wade than after. That concerns the years immediately prior to Roe and immediately after it was decided–I would guess in the last decade there is significantly less abortion than in the 60s and 70s. There has been a significant decline in abortion in the last 15 years and even in the last 25 years largely due to people genuinely practicing more safe sex and using contraception, people also have sex for the first time at an older age now.
Many people who grew up in the 70s/80s and even 90s don’t realize it, but the kids…actually started listening to all the sex ed lectures we ignored. It isn’t just that teen pregnancy has fallen through the floor, teen sex has as well. Kids are actually understanding the long-term consequences of things better and making more mature decisions than they did 30-50 years ago.
Here’s another data point that may be of interest. According to the latest available figures, the abortion rate in the US is 20.8 per 1000. The rate in Canada, where all abortion laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1988, so that abortion has been legal everywhere for 34 years, is 15.2 per 1000.
Abortion was not just legal—it was a safe, condoned, and practiced procedure in colonial America and common enough to appear in the legal and medical records of the period. Official abortion laws did not appear on the books in the United States until 1821, and abortion before quickening did not become illegal until the 1860s. If a woman living in New England in the 17th or 18th centuries wanted an abortion, no legal, social, or religious force would have stopped her.
The Puritans brought their laws on abortion from merry old England, where the procedure was also legal until quickening. Although the Puritans changed much of England’s legal system when they established their “city upon a hill,” they kept abortion as a part of Puritan family life, allowing women to choose when and if they would become mothers—whether for the first time or the fifth time.
Acceptance of early-term abortion changed during the 19th century as Victorian sensibilities took hold. By 1910 abortion—except in cases to save the mother’s life—was a criminal procedure in every state except Kentucky, where the courts declared the procedure to be judicially illegal. The new restrictions on abortion were caused by many factors, including changing social, class, and family dynamics in the early 19th century. Americans in the Victorian era thought abortion was a problem brought on by upper-class white women, who were choosing to start their families later and limit their size. Increased female independence was also perceived as a threat to male power and patriarchy, especially as Victorian women increasingly volunteered outside the home for religious and charitable causes.
Accurate information isn’t available but it’s clear that Roe v. Wade did not create some new flood of abortions by itself. There is no way to tell the impact of Roe v. Wade through the rate of abortions because social attitudes about sex were changing. For instance, the average age that people began having sex was going down resulting in a higher rate of unwanted pregnancies with younger people less likely to use birth control when they are having sex. You can argue that Roe v. Wade affected those social attitudes, but only to some unknown degree.
Birth control has gotten way better since then, with better and safer IUDs, other long term solutions like implants and Depo-Provera, skipping the period part of pill so you stay protected, and so on.
Certainly. At the time of Roe v. Wade it was not readily available, not even sought out by young people often. Condoms were probably the only thing available.
Some people think that IUDs, morning after pills and anything else that prevents fertilized eggs from being implanted are also forms of abortion. Besides which, some might go after Griswold and ban all birth control.
I was looking for the pre-Roe numbers today, too, but they’re very hard to find. I did find one source that showed a massive spike in abortions between 1968 and 1973. The “skyrocketing” shown after 1973 in most charts is actually a reduction from the years prior.
This is the history that pro-choice groups rely upon, but there are a cadre of conservative scholars who seize upon the technicality that the laws themselves were all against abortion from the beginning. Normally, those on the right like to trace history to common law, but that’s not convenient for abortion since the common law ignored the issue; indeed could do nothing because only individual women had any say over when the quickening happened.
The nascent American Medical Association, all men, had a core value of taking control over medicine away from midwives and other unlicensed practitioners who traditionally cared for women’s issues. They claimed to be an independent source on when quickening took place and sought to be the sole deciders.
To be fair, a huge number of almost always dangerous abortifacients were also on the market and needed control. Yet as with other snake oil medicines it took until the 20th century to pass those laws, long after abortions were made illegal.
No possible source of historic numbers is known. The best data I know of is from the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice organization. The table has a large number of columns, but the numbers on abortions before the 1970s are ludicrously low because they are from reports of occurrence.
I’m confused by this statement after looking at the chart - actually, the data used to compile the chart……which is below the chart.
It seems show that abortion was very rare up until 1968 or so, (I’m assuming that this is when the states started to legalize) then the rate climbs steadily until 1978 or so, then it starts to level off, then starts to climb back down in the early 1990’s. The results may be slightly different depending on which metric in the chart you are checking (#number of procedures, rate of abortions to live births, etc) but I see nothing that indicates any reduction in abortions after Roe vs Wade.
The chart is interesting, but really doesn’t get at what I’m interested in. The footnote defines abortions as “known or estimated legal abortions occurring in the U.S.” I’m interested in all abortions, not just the legal ones.
Any reliable estimates out there on how many women got illegal abortions?
That’s an awfully speculative assertion for FQ. To the best of my knowledge, there is hard data to support the statement that teens are indeed less sexually active now than they were in previous decades.
But can you definitively state that this is because they are more mature? Or could it be for some other reason, such as the lure of digital technology?