Baker notable theory on why NY passed the extreme abortion law
i have the same opinion of you
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As long as people have been having sex, there have been women having abortions. The American debate over whether a woman should have the right to end her pregnancy is a relatively new phenomenon. Indeed, for America’s first century, abortion wasn’t even banned in a single US state. And abortion was generally "socially" permissible until a woman felt a fetus move, or “quicken.”
However, this changed dramatically in the 19th century. Social pressure and education had been effective abortion deterrents in the past, but as the morality of America grew more relaxed, abortion gained a larger foothold in American life, so lawmakers started dealing with it specifically and explicitly. In 1821, the first abortion legislation was passed in Connecticut, and lawmakers elsewhere did their best to keep up. New York legislation changed on abortion 10 times between 1828 and 1881.13 The frequency of abortion, however, continued to increase.
During the 1840's and 1850's, 13 states passed laws forbidding abortion at any stage. Three others made abortion illegal after quickening. In 1856, the Iowa Supreme Court held that pre-quickening abortion was not a crime, but in the next legislature, the prohibitions against pre-quickening abortions were restored.
The laws every state passed by 1880 banned abortions in all cases but for “therapeutic reasons” that were largely left up to the medical practice and the legal system to determine. In practice, that meant wealthier women with better access to doctors had abortions, while many other women did not. And as other countries began liberalizing their abortion laws, women who could afford it began circulating pamphlets on how to make the trip.
Abortion made its biggest gains, however, on the back of another infamous and fast-growing American practice: prostitution. By the middle of the 19th century, there were somewhere in the vicinity of 60,000 prostitutes employed in America. With not much in the way of birth control, and with an average of 30-40 sexual encounters a week, frequent pregnancy was a given. Abortionists entered the field driven by profit and the related business of extorting money from the johns.
And the abortion bans were wholly unsuccessful as a total lack of enforcement made such laws almost useless. As one anti-abortion crusader lamented "It is not possible to get twelve men together without at least one of them being personally responsible for the downfall of a girl, or at least interested in getting her out of her difficulty." And as laws continued to go unenforced a general public apathy combined to have a snow-ball effect and opposition to abortion began to lose much of its moral framework.
In medical text books, abortion was counseled against for the potential risks it presented to women rather than for the life it destroyed. "The right to destroy," in fact, became central to the belief system Margaret Sanger began espousing and she celebrated the "virtue" of sexual promiscuity and attacked any women's shelter which counseled otherwise. Margaret Sanger would go on to found Plannned Parenthood.
The final move to repeal the abortion bans in the 1960's was in part driven by doctors appalled at the women with perforated uteruses lining up at emergency rooms and a budding environmentalist movement worried about population growth. The birth control issue split the pro-life community for many years and hamstrung their efforts during the crucial 1960's, when public opinion began to shift in significant fashion.
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In 1962, national news reports of a women who died from an illegal abortion horrified the nation, and "All-American" mom, Sherri Finkbine, became famous for having to go to Sweden to abort the child she feared would be disabled. The average American began to perceive illegal abortion, rather than abortion itself, as the real problem. In 1967, Colorado and California became the first states to legalize abortion for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest, for pregnancies that threatened the life of the mother, or for pregnancies of severely handicapped children. Over the next three years, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina and Virginia all followed suit. In 1970 New York became the first state to offer unrestricted abortion during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. Hawaii, Alaska and Washington soon followed.
Then, suddenly, on a single day in 1973, all the remaining 19th-century bans were wiped out . The famed Roe v. Wade SCOTUD decision was handed down in 1973, all state laws regulating abortion were stricken, and abortion on demand became the law of the land. States could only ban abortion at fetal viability.
At the time of that decision in 1972, a Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans (64 percent) thought “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” That’s no longer the case, as abortion has become hopelessly partisan,yet among most people, (if not politicians) abortion is not nearly as controversial as the headlines might suggest. The most recent Gallup data shows that exactly half of Americans say abortion should be “legal only under certain circumstances,” while a third say it should be legal in all circumstances. That means that only a minority — 18 percent — want abortion banned entirely. Yet since Roe was decided States have enacted literally thousands of laws restricting abortions.
How will it all end - at this rate, not well.