Column: How doctors created the abortion debacle by trying to crush midwifery
Justice Samuel Alito continued his historical negationism with the claim in the Dobbs decision that “The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Alito assumes that if there is no litigation over a personal liberty, that liberty could not have existed. He does not see the more likely possibility that the liberty was so widely accepted that few challenged it.
All of the legacy privacy liberties guaranteed by the Ninth, Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments are thus swept away in an act of authoritarian disdain.
Historians agree midwives were an important part of American life from colonial days onward. The midwife cared for an expectant mother, attended to birth and its complications, completed an incomplete miscarriage, induced a needed abortion, gave neonatal care to a baby, post-partum care to the mother, and general health care for the family. The midwife was trained by apprenticing with an experienced midwife, then working beside an experienced midwife as a journeywoman.
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Midwives felt that abortion should not be performed after quickening except to save the life of the woman. Midwives had a reputation for cleanliness, achieving aseptic procedures. It took until 1865 for British surgeon Joseph Lister to propose that surgeons wash their hands and instruments with dilute carbolic acid before and after surgery to sterilize them, and use concentrated carbolic acid on wounds to prevent infection.
Advertisements show midwives greatly valued in colonial America, with one town offering a house to an experienced midwife to work there. If a midwife was not available or a woman preferred other care givers, she bought a homeowner’s compendium of useful information such as "The American Instructor" published by Ben Franklin in 1748. The medical section, first published in 1734, gave detailed instructions for performing an abortion. This was non-controversial and sold well.
Evangelical Christians came from Victorian England in the 1830s proclaiming that a fertilized ovum was a full human being and that abortion was murder, a position contrary to canon law and civil law. The Roman Catholic Church was more influential and accepted abortion until quickening until 1873. White supremacists worried that most abortions went to white Protestant women, endangering the numerical supremacy of the white Protestants.
Medical schools created obstetrics and gynecology programs in the 1840s. Medical doctors formed the American Medical Association in the 1840s to “professionalize medicine,” apparently by taking over the ob/gyn practice from midwives. This developed into opposition to abortion. It took only two years of study, three years of “preceptership” (apprenticeship) and 21 years of age to get an M.D., no college or pre-med courses needed.
Horatio Robinson Storer, M.D. became chief gynecologist at Boston’s Lying-In Hospital in 1856, at the age of 26 years. In 1857, he started a campaign to criminalize midwifery and abortion that spread across the country. When doctors took up the anti-abortion crusade, laws restricting abortion were passed. Also, in 1873, the Comstock Act declared women’s health information and barrier contraceptives as obscene as pornography and non-mailable.
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By the 1880s, most states restricted abortion to before quickening. Bans on abortion mainly came in 1929 to 1931. Knowledge of midwifery and abortion were suppressed; maternal and infant mortality increased due to increased surgical interventions and infections and unaffordability of care.
The more women’s rights were taken away, the worse pregnancy outcomes were and the harsher laws became. Indiana’s gerrymandered legislature hastened to deprive women, children, the elderly, the poor, disabled and minorities of their legacy personal freedoms. Only by all Hoosiers of conscience standing together to oppose this descending darkness can we live in liberty.
John Daschke, Ph.D., is a resident of Bloomington, a retired professor of Political Science and public policy consultant.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Columnist argues abortion debate is tied to medicine, midwifery
