Beck before Roe v. Wade, abortion was illegal in many except to save the life of the mother. But now even that exception is dubious because doctors are afraid that a zealous prosecutor could argue that the mother’s life was not really in danger and women have died because of it. Or been near death. Or had to be airlifted to another state.
Does anyone know what the situation was before Roe v. Wade? I know all about back alley abortions with coathangers, but I am asking about whether doctors (outside Catholic hospitals anyway) were constrained from using their best judgment.
If a woman was lucky enough to have a sympathetic (or mercenary) gynecologist, she could get a dilation and curettage for “menstrual cramps”. Pregnancy, what pregnancy?
Some of those were genuine – I actually did have a D&C for severe menstrual cramps.
Didn’t do a damn thing for the cramps, of course; though they thought at the time that it would, and it did take care of the semiperforate hymen which I didn’t even know about; I only knew that I couldn’t get a tampon in. Shortly after that I was able to get the pill, which took care of the cramps nicely (with an even nicer side effect.)
My impression is that, at least for women with money available, genuine therapeutic abortions (needed for health reasons) weren’t an issue. But I was mostly in NYState, and it may have been different elsewhere (NY still has abortion access now, and was IIRC one of the earlier states to allow it.)
In late 1969 I saw a movie “To Find a Man,” set in NY, about a nerdy boy helping a girl he had a crush on find an abortion doctor - the problem was money, not access. She had gotten pregnant by her mother’s awful boyfriend.
That was very early.
BTW the Times reported recently that the number of abortions had actually gone up, and not decreased even in the states banning them. Before Roe probably many doctors were trained that abortion was evil and illegal - it is hard to go back to that attitude for doctors who have been doing it legally for decades.
The ones objecting on religious grounds probably never did any no matter what the legal status was.
Note that now about 63% of abortions are done via pill (two-drug regimen: mifepristone and misoprostol)–and these have only been available since 2000–and that in many states this can be done via telehealth.
Between traveling out of state, sympathetic doctors, smuggled abortion drugs, manuals such as in the book Our Bodies, Our Selves on how to make a safe, do-it-yourself vacuum abortion apparatus, and for all I know RVs outfitted as secret mobile abortion clinics, I think state laws banning abortion would be as widely flouted as dry laws or laws making contraception illegal. If the pro-life crowd thinks that they can actually get rid of abortion, they’re dreaming.
I doubt their primary motivation is actual sadism, if only because there is (almost?) no such thing in real life as mustache-twirlers who go “mu-hwa-ha!”. I presume that they really do want to put an end to abortions, if not for any consideration of human life than as part of a general “fornication is evil” attitude towards sexuality– which was more or less the original basis for banning abortion.
They show no interest in (or outright oppose) measures that might actually reduce abortions, while having or coercing abortions when they find it convenient. They are just liars.
And I disagree; people motivate by cruelty and malice are common, not rare.
Well as I mentioned, many have a “fornication is evil” attitude, which means that for example they’re not going to be in favor of improved access to birth control.
And they started trying to make birth control more difficult to get, by spreading misinformation about harmful health effects for it. They may have stopped because they keep losing votes on restoring abortion rights.
If there has been any move towards making men responsible for the unwanted expense of an unwanted child, I haven’t heard about it.