Abortion in Historical Perspective

Abortion has always been a women's issue. It has not always been a medical issue, or a legal issue, but it has always been an issue of personal liberty and reproductive freedom for women.

As a historian-in-training, I'm convinced of the value of perspective. All too often people don't stop to consider the larger picture, and so they fail to see the context surrounding our many "contemporary social problems." I think the number of abortion posts this site has witnessed attests to the fact that abortion qualifies as a "contemporary social problem." And, just as with any number of other such problems, abortion (like prostitution) can and should be analyzed and considered in historical context; not as some abhorrent aberration, but as the result of complex historical happenstance. By seeking to understand the history surrounding the current debate we can reach a more nuanced, profound comprehension of the issue.

This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive telling of the history of birth control; rather, it is intended as a sketch of the sexual politics and power that have held sway over women’s lives for so many millennia, which is being played out presently, in part, in the abortion debate.

Before the advent of a reliable oral contraceptive in the 1950s, women’s lives were controlled by birth. Prior to that, a woman could not exert much control over her sexual and reproductive functions – that was the province of her father, her husband, or her brother. There was no such thing as reproductive freedom; ordinary women’s very lives were at the mercy of their husband’s sex drives. Who can imagine the countless sorrowful women who died in childbirth or from pregnancy complications? And how many of those pregnancies were unintentional?

Abortion is a form of birth control. For as long as women have been sentient they have dealt with issues of birth control, including abortion and infanticide. Since the dawn of civilization The Powers That Be have legislated dictates proscribing when and how such acts are acceptable. These are not new issues.

Women have not historically been afforded the personal liberty to determine for themselves when they might reproduce. They have been beholden onto their husbands desires, and not free to decide whether they wanted to be mothers. It was a given: women were, by their nature, wives and mothers.

Only in the modern world have women been granted the freedom and – through the birth control pill and other, newer contraceptive innovations – the license to exercise any significant influence over the sexual and reproductive aspects of themselves. The abortion debate is about how much reproductive freedom society is willing to allow women. It is not about the sanctity of human life; that is an issue in the debate, no doubt, but it is not the central issue. The central issue of the abortion debate is female autonomy, and it always has been.

Women have always sought to control their procreative function -- be it via contraception or abortion or infanticide -- as a way to exert some measure of influence over their lot in life. That is precisely why they continue do so today, and why ardent feminists will always be in favor of allowing women access to safe abortions.