Bible Study_What do we have Against Women_5.19.22
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The American Medical Association's crusade against abortion was partly a professional move, to establish the supremacy of "regular" physicians over midwives and homeopaths. Immigration, especially by Catholics and nonwhites, was...
show moreImmigration, especially by Catholics and nonwhites, was increasing, while birth rates among white native-born Protestants were declining. (Unlike the typical abortion patient of today, that of the nineteenth century was a middle- or upper-class white married woman.) Would the West "be filled by our own children or by those of aliens?" the physician and anti-abortion leader Horatio R. Storer asked in 1868. "This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation."
Nonetheless, having achieved their legal goal, many doctors—including prominent members of the AMA—went right on providing abortions.
Thus in an 1888 exposé undercover reporters for the Chicago Times obtained an abortion referral from no less a personage than the head of the Chicago Medical Society. (He claimed he was conducting his own investigation.) Unless a woman died, doctors were rarely arrested and even more rarely convicted. Even midwives—whom doctors continued to try to drive out of business by portraying them, unfairly, as dangerous abortion quacks—practiced largely unmolested.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/abortion-in-american-history/376851/
Prior to the civil war abortions are broadly legal and manage entirely by women as nearly all reproductive healthcare in the country is managed by women in the form of midwives. Two led to the criminalizing of abortion, civil war in which white women were charged with traveling to the north, south, east and west of the country to have more babies in order to combat the "browning" of the US and in 1847 a group of white men founded the american medical association,
John Yang, PBS News Hour: In 1847, a group of white men formed the American Medical Association. They pushed for laws to make abortion illegal in an effort to put midwives like Madame Restell out of business. The effort to outlaw abortion was also driven by a growing fear of foreign nonwhite immigration and declining birth rates among white Protestants.
Michele Goodwin Author, "Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood":
It was deeply racial, tying into the fact that the nation was soon to be at war and that there were tensions that were already building, with abolitionists saying, these are horrible things that we see taking place in the antebellum South. And so they connected a racist impact to that too, saying that white women needed to use their loins and go north, south, east and west because of the potential browning of America.
• Jennifer Holland, University of Oklahoma: In the mid-'60s, you have this reform movement grow up. And clergy were really outspoken in this particular reform movement. And it's this group of clergy from all different denominations, Jewish, Protestant. And they counseled women about abortion, and helped them seek abortions, and not only that, but then the clergy would testify about their actions in the state legislatures. So they were openly breaking the law.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exploring-the-complicated-history-of-abortion-in-the-united-states
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