Customer Reviews

When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973

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In summary:
*Don't read this book if you are pro-life and you want data to support your beliefs.
*Do read this book if you are pro-choice and you want data to support your beliefs.
*Do read this book if you need to do historical research on abortions and if you need specific examples of how abortions were performed in the early 1900's.

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Most of the reviewers who have given this book a negative review seem to be pro-life and seem to be basing their opinion off of their political beliefs. I can see why they're disappointed. With a title like: When Abortion Was A Crime, they were probably expecting something that would support their political beliefs. If you want to read a book to support your pro-life beliefs, don't read this one. It is very obviously pro-choice.

Reagan starts off with a premise that although the law and the church were against abortion, women in the general public were not. She covers historical periods both before and after birth control was widely available. Before birth control was available, the majority of women who had abortions were married and already had children. Some of them felt like they had no other option than to abort a child. If they had sex with their husband, they would eventually get pregnant. If they got pregnant, how would they feed their eleventh child?

I read this book for a specific reason. I was trying to find out what a woman experienced if she had an abortion in 1910. This book was perfect for that. It talked about the different options she had available (midwives and doctors), the different procedures she could have gone through. Before I read this book, I thought that all experiences with abortion when abortion was illegal were similar to what women went through in the fifties. Highly illegal, dangerous, and dirty. I was quite surprised to find out that between 1900 and 1920 fewer women died from abortions than in 1950, and that number was adjusted for population growth. The women still died in 1910. It was still a dangerous procedure, and a doctor could still perforate a woman's uterus, pull out her intestines and kill her while performing an abortion. The woman could still die of septic infection. But there were much better places to go earlier in the century because the public was more accepting.

This is elegant historical scholarship that is informative and compelling. I was struck by the way the author used the voices of so many people--women, legal authorities, doctors and journalists to explain not only the legal history of abortion but so much about American history and about women's lives. I'm sorry some other reviewers seem compelled to push their politics rather than describe the book--perhaps they didn't bother to read it. The book is well documented and a model for how to write and explain women's lives.

I am retired from the practice of family medicine, and witnessed the remakabe anguish and hardship that unplanned pregnancy constituted for so many women of all ages and stations. Dr. Reagan's work is a much needed one that provides an accurate and scholarly review of the history of abortion in the United States and the ways in which they were obtained before Roe vs. Wade. In an era when the greater majority of the population is too young to remember the bad old days when abortions were illegal, this is particularly important. Further, while some charge that opponents of a women's right to choose are deluded and ignorant religious fanatics, I do not believe this is necessarily true. Given accurate information such as that provided by "When Abortion Was A Crime," most people can and will make reasoned choices. I found this to be particulaly true when a daughter or wife or other family member is involved.
This book is a meticulously researched derivation from Reagan's doctoral dissertation, and has received numerous awards that include "Outstanding Book of the Year by Choice," the "President's Award from the Social Science History Association," and the "Law and Society Association's James Willard Hurst Prize for Best Book in Legal History."

--Dr. John R. Guthrie

This book is an absolute must for anyone with an interest in the history of abortion in the US. Leslie Regean goes into great detail about the developments of the anti-abortion movement and how this effected women, doctors, and midwives throughout US history. She includes specific stories, court and hospital documents, as well as evidence for the changing roles of reproductive medicine for women. This book is just plain amazing. I cannot stress enough how important it is for all pro-choicers to read this book. You will be reminded of how important it is to keep abortion legal and how our struggles for choice are not through.

I've just ordered this book, because it's theme is not just history for me, it was a frightening part of my life. When I was a teenager abortion was a crime: and the choices that forced on women was another crime. Two of my young friends got pregnant while in high school, one at 14 and one at 16, "A" students both, they were forced to drop out of high school, marry, and face the world with a 9th and 10th grade education. Oh, the 14 year-old was "allowed" to come back and take her freshman finals: very possibly because a 14 year old, 9 months pregnant, was meant to be a frightening an object lesson, and one that successfully prevented me from having sex until I was 19. Which meant that my first love at 17 left me after a year of frustration for both of us. Another of my friends was sent to Arizona to live with her Aunt for her "asthma" -- I now believe to have a baby in a home for unwed mothers. Which was another object lesson in our town, a home for unwed mothers, from which troops of teenage unwed mothers marched to the local mall together. To a lower-middle class girl like myself, sex was frightening, because it meant I might not escape the fate of my friends" a furnished basement "apartment" in their parents's home, a new baby, a teenage husband, and no education. When I made it to state college, I began to have sex with another long-term boyfriend, still frightened, watching another friend get pregnant at 19, and drop out of college for another baby and teenage husband. My fear was only partly relieved by a local campus character we all called "Crazy Charlie" for what-seemed to be tall tales of his exploits. But I was ready to take on face value what Crazy Charlie said one day: that he knew a doctor in Philadelphia, who would perform an abortion for $200. (To give you an idea of how much money that was 35 years ago, it was 1/10 of my yearly tuition and board at state college.) But if I had gotten pregnant, I would have spent that money, and trusted my health and fate to a Crazy Charlie, and the man he claimed was a doctor, who could have been a nurse, mid-wife, or have no medical training whatsoever, all because I wanted to have a future. I would have risked my life for my future, at a time when the New York Daily News printed photographs of women who had died in a pool of blood, after illegal abortions. My sister, four years younger than I, also had a friend who got pregnant at 16, while abortion was still a crime. But she lucked upon an underground railroad of authority figures that included ministers and doctors, who found doctors to perform abortions for women in need, the forerunners of the doctors, ministers and others who pressured the courts for Roe vs. Wade, because they were sick unto death, of dealing with the ugly aftermath of illegal abortion: the suicides of pregnant women, the botched abortions that killed or maimed thousands of women a year in the United States. Because they were also aware of another dirty secret: that upper middle class and wealthy women were routinely and discretely given D&Cs at the clean and safe hospitals of their leafy suburbs, that those with money were also able to send their daughters to Puerto Rico for abortions masked as "vacations." That only lower middle class and poor women were forced to face murder and maiming through illegal abortions. In the states which restrict abortion, so-called "Abortion Wards" are returning, filling with women maimed by illegal abortions -- and again, damn few are daughters or wives of money. Today, my sister's friend who had an abortion at 16 has gone on to marry, have two children, and become a pharmacist (and I doubt that she's one of those pharmacists who deny patients birth control, or emergency birth control.) None of my friends who got pregnant in high school came to our ten year reunion -- I heard that one said she was still "ashamed" that she'd never graduated. All who would support the elimination of legal abortion, keep in mind the tragedies you'd guarantee: maimed and murdered women, lives stopped short, more unwanted children in the world. There are 500,000 children in the foster care at this moment -- how many million more do you want? Many of those children are adoptable, but will not be adopted -- why don't "pro-life" advocates step forward to adopt them now? Do you want the forced return to warehouse orphanages for still more unwanted children? Do you want women sent to prison for seeking an abortion, and doctors also jailed, when we already have a shortage of doctors in this country? And nurses jailed, when we have a shortage of nurses in this country? How much damage and destruction of life will you support to force the rest of us to subscribe to your "religous" views? I've never heard a so-called "pro-life" advocate answer those questions honestly. Making abortion illegal will not stop abortions, it will just stop safe abortions, as is the reality in the few civilized countries in which abortion isn't legal, but their abortion wards are full to bursting with maimed women, and whose morgues overflow with dead women.

I read this over the past week. During this week Utah passed a law criminalizing miscarriages, a legislator in Virginia claimed that having abortion would cause God to punish women with deformed/disabled children, and a Right for Life group put up a billboard saying that abortion was being used as a genocide method on black people. Even if a lot of the situations described in the book were not eerily familiar this makes it clear that the epilogue on the limits of Roe v. Wade is very apt.

The book gives a great detailed history of changing attitudes and practices about abortion in America going all the way back to colonial periods. It makes clear how modern all the "life begins when sperm meets egg" actually is. The book focuses on events in Chicago, though it brings in examples from the national stage. It is upsetting to read all the examples of women seeking abortions in the late 19th early 20th century knowing that the only reason they can be listed is that they fail. The history also goes into detail about how different it was for women of different classes and races. It is also worth noting that it brings up how the whole "racial suicide/genocide" was first used by white men with a couple of generations history in the United States who were freaked out about no longer being the majority with all the immigrants who generally had more children. There is even someone who bluntly points out that if abortion is available for the lower working class then there wont be much of a cheep labor pool to draw from.

The thing that is most resonant is who in the pre- Roe v Wade era abortion was not uniformly illegal. There was such a thing as "therapeutic abortion" for women whose lives were threatened be pregnancy and there was a lot of debate on whether or not that should be expanded to cover social considerations. These days many people want to police who is allowed to get an abortion, or access to contraceptives. In response women have to justify the decision not to have a baby, as well as the decisions that led to its conception. It is like nothing changed.

The author is clearly pro-choice, but that does not make any of the facts in the book less true. I have read 4 books on abortion so far and this and the one in the link below are the best so far. In other reviews, the people who don't like this book are clearly anti-abortion, so they don't like that the author is pro-choice. Reviewers that like this book tell a little of their own story. And then, other attack them. This does not seem the place to work out the issue of abortion. It is too complex and there are many aspects to abortion: medical, philosophical, moral, spiritual, legal, metaphysical, historical. There is a LOT to know. And much of what is written would really surprise folks on both sides. If you want to be really knowledgeable about the issue of abortion, this is an important book to read.

The Ethics of Abortion : Pro-Life Vs. Pro-Choice (Contemporary Issues)

Ms. Reagan's book contains a good social history of abortion from its criminalization to the present. However, the book soon turns into a political manifesto and Reagan takes her case overboard in many situations. When reading the Epilogue, one wonders if Ms. Reagan had forgotten that she is a professional historian and not a political lobbyist. Also, she has failed to consider some key issues in the book, mainly the rights of the father to a say in the fate of the unborn child. Surely some men raised their voices in defense of their reproductive rights, but we don't get this from Ms. Reagan's account. From her viewpoint, the mother is the only one who should be able to determine the child's fate, and she is very upset that doctors still have some authority in the determination. Also, anyone who has read the decision of Roe v. Wade would be surprised that Ms. Reagan finds it such a radical development for women. The decision clearly leaves main authority with the physician, and after the first trimester the state has rights to regulate abortion, especially after viability (6-7 months). I argue that Roe v. Wade was actually a conservative decision, and the court left a major opening for overturning it: if anyone can convince the court that the Constitution includes the unborn under the term "person" then the whole decision falls to the ground under the Fourteenth Amendment. I enjoyed the book, and it made me rethink a few things, but I was turned off by Ms. Reagan's blatant partisanship. As a professional historian, she should have been more objective. It is okay for a historian to interject opinions, but Ms. Reagan has taken it to the extreme, and in the process, she has called her own objectivity into question.

Anytime anyone stands up and writes logically about abortion, the people who want to change the laws based on their religious beliefs start slandering both the facts and the character of the writers.
Read this book for yourself, then check out the historical facts.
Abortion is not for everyone. Banning abortion is not for everyone. Each religious organization should set standards for their own adherants. The rest of us do not have to follow them.

Yet another political diatribe posing as history. The first, primary question to be asked, ANY time abortion is brought up, is: Are we dealing only with the life/well being of the woman, or are we also dealing with the life/well being of her baby/fetus? Virtally every feminist argument in favor of abortion begs this question unapologetically, but if you question them about it, they become defensive, shrill, and their subsequent arguments are laced with ideological rants and euphemisms (words like "choice" and "reproductive freedom," for instance, are virtually meaningless in terms of logical argument--their sole function is to inflame the emotions of the listener).

Leslie Reagan also refers to how common abortion is, as if that had any bearing on whether it is an acceptable practice or not. After all, there was a time when slavery was very common. Domestic violence is also very common. Even if every single woman in America has had an abortion, that has absolutely no bearing on whether the practice is ethical or not. Again, the liberal viewpoint dissolves into a sort of relativism that cannot be penetrated by rational thought.

The quality of a society can be measured by how that society treats its most helpless members. In the United States, more often than not, the "progressive" view is that we have the right to kill them. With that fact in mind, I'm afaid that future generations will look back on our abortion culture with the same revulsion and shame that we now look back on slavery.