From When Abortion Was a Crime to Abortion Is a Crime.

Abstract

From When Abortion Was a Crime to Abortion Is a Crime Leslie J. Reagan (bio) I began researching the history of abortion in the United States when I was in Judy Leavitt’s Women and Health class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Assigned a research paper, I suggested the 1960s abortion legalization movement. “That’s too recent,” Judy replied; she advised me to instead examine the medical literature for discussions of abortion. I went to the UW’s incredible medical library, where I used the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office to identify journal articles about abortion and then tracked them down in dozens of regional and specialist medical journals held by the library.1 In this first-year graduate seminar paper, I discovered the persistent conversation among doctors about abortion and their own practices and techniques of performing what they called “therapeutic abortion”—induced when the physician believed that pregnancy threatened the life or health of the woman. The medical literature included patient case studies, collective data, the introduction of new instruments, and discussion about when a therapeutic abortion was required. At one point I switched to colonial history, but one sleepless night of tossing and turning told me that I was not done researching abortion. I made it my dissertation topic. The threat to the legality of abortion posed by Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, while I was a college student, had turned me into an activist, so the topic mattered to me. [End Page 11] But equally important, no one had investigated the hundred years during which abortion from conception on had been criminalized across the nation. What happened to women when early abortion was criminalized? What role did the medical profession play in the new legal landscape? How did the state enforce the new laws?2 I have been asked what it’s like to do research on a “controversial” topic. I don’t know that I ever thought much about whether focusing on abortion was controversial or dangerous. My advisors, Judy Leavitt and Linda Gordon, supported the project. And as an activist before becoming a graduate student, I had already managed my fears of public speaking; my anxieties focused more on writing. The one person who expressed opposition to this dissertation topic, renowned historian Gerda Lerner, was trying to protect me and other students of hers interested in studying sexuality from jeopardizing their future careers; the profession was far more conservative at that time, and many historians were suspicious and disrespectful of topics they considered trivial or not “real history.” She feared that the new field of women’s history and the UW Women’s History Program that she founded could be associated with sexuality and sexual nonconformity at a time when women’s history was already widely marginalized. Her anxiety resembled feminist Betty Friedan’s fear that the “purple menace”—i.e., lesbianism—would hurt the new feminist movement and her new organization, the National Organization for Women (NOW). But Gerda’s fears arose both from her knowledge of the male-dominated historical profession and from her experience as a Jew and a leftist in a rapidly Nazifying Austria: as a student in Vienna, after the 1938 Anschluss, she had been active in the student anti-Nazi resistance and was imprisoned for six weeks until she managed to escape to the United States. A decade later she had seen how the 1950s McCarthyist Red Scare destroyed many people’s careers (including her husband’s).3 But Gerda was no coward: despite her disapproval of sex-related topics, when I told her of my plan to pursue the history of abortion, she soon returned to her role as a historian and mentor, suggesting archives and sources. Though Gerda’s response unnerved me, I plunged ahead—with the support of my advisors Judy Leavitt and [End Page 12] Linda Gordon4 and the extraordinary group of women’s history graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. I was fortunate, too, to find support from the wider historical profession. Senior scholars whom I knew only as books, like Jim Mohr, Joan Brumberg, Allan Brandt, and Nancy Tomes...