“…Abortion was not always illegal before Roe. Into the 19th century, what a woman did with her early pregnancy was considered a purely domestic matter. Until “quickening,” when the fetus was perceived to be alive and kicking, it wasn’t even considered a pregnancy, but a “blocking” or an “imbalance,” and women regularly “restored the menses,” if they so chose, through plants and potions. Abortifacients became commercially available by the mid-1700s.

Quality control was not great, and the earliest abortion legislation, in the 1820s and ’30s, appears to have been an effort to curtail poisoning rather than abortion itself. According to several historians of the issue, as abortion—both through drugs and direct procedures—became a bigger and bigger commercial venture, “orthodox” physicians, who were competing with midwives, homeopaths, and self-styled practitioners of all stripes, pushed to make abortion illegal. The nascent American Medical Association established its dominance over lay practitioners through abortion laws, and women were kept in their place. Eugenics played a role, too: With “undesirables” breeding prolifically, motherhood was hailed as a white woman’s patriotic duty, abortion a form of treason. By the mid-1800s, most of the “folk” knowledge had been lost and abortion became “infanticide.” Between 1860 and 1880, antiabortion laws spread city by city, state by state. Now there was a ruthlessly pragmatic aspect: In the aftermath of the slaughter of half a million men during the Civil War, the births were needed. First the men were conscripted, then the women….”