The Abortion Debate - The Year of Action

Let me take you back in time, to a time long before Roe v Wade. Based on how much attention abortion gets today, it might surprise you to know that we haven’t always had abortion laws in the US. It wasn’t until the late 19th century (or as Joe Biden called it, the teenage years) that the American Medical Association started calling for the illegalization of abortion, arguing that if a human life hung in the balance, no one should interfere, although historians think they were maybe just tired of competing with midwives and wanted to shorten the list of what they could do. Before the AMA came along, medical professionals could freely perform abortions before what was called “the quickening” – the point at which the fetus is big and developed enough to move around and make itself known to the outside world. Unfortunately, they made abortion happen with poisonous herbs and it was easy to accidentally kill the woman along with her unborn child.