Brief history of abortion law demonstrates that termination before "quickening" is the compromise to end this hysteria and the late term abortion problem…
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.
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