Abortion in pre-Roe v Wade America 

At the founding of The United States of America in 1776 until 1821, when Connecticut passed a law criminalizing abortion, abortion was legal throughout the United States if performed before the fetus could survive outside the womb [1]. However, as the middle of the 19th century drew near, the doctors of the American Medical Association were leading a movement to criminalize abortion and by 1900, all states had outlawed abortion unless it was absolutely necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life. The criminalization of abortion steered desperate women to an estimated 1,000,000 illegal, unsafe abortions every year being performed by doctors and pregnant women alike which led to an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 deaths [2]. This threat to the public health, along with the emerging women’s rights trend in America led to the revitalization of the abortion debate in the late 1950s.

The pro-choice movement gained traction in the late 1950s on the back of legalizing abortion as a tool for public health and equal rights for women. As stated above, the hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions performed every year were a danger to the public’s health, especially the poor. While wealthier women could often pay a doctor to determine that carrying their pregnancy to term would endanger their life and thus perform an abortion, poorer women did not have that luxury and were forced to look for other alternatives, including attempting to terminate their pregnancy themselves. Also, pro-choice proponents outlined the plight of pregnant women who had learned they would bear a child with severe mental or physical defects. On the equal rights for women front, prominent Feminist leaders called for the legalization of abortion to allow women the opportunity to control the timing of their childbearing so that they could equally participate at work, home, and political office. Altogether, these factors prompted 16 states by 1970 to enact new laws that allowed abortion when “carrying the pregnancy to term would threaten a woman’s health, when there was a high possibility of birth defects, or when the pregnancy was the result of rape”, a viewpoint supported by the majority of Americans in 1966.

As individual states began expanding the legality of abortions, a large group of professionals including doctors and lawyers were determined to outlaw abortion altogether. The strongest organization on the pro-life front was the Catholic Church, who fought the legality of abortion state by state. While the Protestant Clergy sat back and quietly encouraged reform and even set up The Clergy Consultation Service to help women find safe abortions [1], the Catholic Church was outspoken and involved in the politics of abortion. Catholic leaders were determined to ensure the law in The United States of America reflected the teachings of the Catholic Church and fought reform at local, state, and national levels. To combat the campaigns to legalize abortion state by state, the Catholic Church established the National Right to Life Committee with a budget of $300,000 to fight the movement at the local level [1].  Also, in 1967, as New York State was considering expanding legal abortion, the Catholic Church responded with all 1,700 Catholic churches in the state of New York to read a letter to their followers warning that the “right of innocent human beings is sacred” and comes “from God Himself” [1]. Overall, the Catholic Church stood at the forefront of the pro-life movement and emphasized opposition to abortion as a key part of the Catholic identity.