Quote:
Originally Posted by Aquila
What is interesting is that abortion was legal in many states and localities up until the mid 1800's. There are even old ads advertising the service in various publications.
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http://www.abort73.com/abortion_fact...rtion_history/
"The first known conviction for the "intention to abort" was handed down in Maryland in the year 1652.1 Four years later, also in Maryland, a woman was arrested for murder after procuring an abortion, but the case was thrown out when she married the only witness, who then refused to testify.2 A 1710 Virginia law made it a capital crime to conceal a pregnancy and then be found with a dead baby.3 Likewise, a 1719 Delaware law made anyone who counseled abortion or infanticide an accessory to murder.4 Olasky notes that at this point in history, "infanticide was probably the most frequent way of killing unwanted, illegitimate children."5 "Abortifacients were known and used in early America," but since using them "was like playing Russian roulette with three bullets in the chambers."6
While individual state laws were varied and didn't always have specific legislation for abortion and/or infanticide, those that did all shared a common problem. It was almost impossible to produce the evidence necessary to convict. Pregnancy was hard to confirm, there was almost never a corpse or witness, and there was always a great deal of jury sympathy for desperate and abandoned women. Nevertheless, there were plenty of non-legislative factors working against the widespread use of abortion and infanticide. One of the chief of these factors was the existing social pressure that expected a man to "act honorably" and propose marriage if he impregnated a woman out of wedlock. "In one Massachusetts county during the 1760's, over 80 percent of non-maritally conceived births were legitimated by the marriage of their parents, and counties in other colonies had similar records... Where fathers resolutely refused marriage, courts in Virginia and other colonies ordered payment. Thus economic desperation was unlikely to drive most unmarried, pregnant women to infanticide or abortion."7
Adding to the influence of society in general was a religious community that uniformly condemned abortion, both for the way the Bible speaks of unborn children and for the testimony of well-known church pillars, the likes of John Calvin, who explicitly forbade abortion. The scientific community, from the 1600's all the way through to the 1800's, believed that babies actually existed before conception, in either the sperm or the egg. Such thinking, faulty though it was, was another anti-abortion influence. Finally, the very difficulty of confirming pregnancy before quickening, made early abortions almost impossible, and late term abortions ruined marriage prospects and were extremely dangerous. "With physical, social, theological and 'scientific' reasons all making abortion unacceptable, only those in extreme duress or with contempt for existing standards would resort to it."8"
Much more at the article, including the history of abortion laws and the factors which led to increases in abortion rates.
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