 | When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 Subjects: Abortion -- United States -- History; Abortion services -- United States -- History; Abortion -- Law and legislation -- United States -- History; In 1900, women attempted to induce abortions by inserting knitting needles, crochet hooks, hairpins, scissors, chicken feathers and cotton balls into their uteruses. In 1917, black women "pinned their faith on... [the] ingestion of... starch or gunpowder and whiskey." Reagan, an assistant professor of history, medicine and women's studies at the University of Illinois, dedicates her disturbing work on abortion in America before Roe v. Wade to "the lives of... women who died trying to control their reproduction." She chronicles the covert efforts and subsequent prosecution of doctors and midwives, and of unmarried women and their lovers (while married women made up the majority of clientele and were accused of "race suicide," they were pursued less often). Reagan has her work cut out for her: Though the law forbade abortions, she writes, "some late-nineteenth-century doctors believed there were two million abortions [performed] every year." And then, as now, debate raged: though some doctors disagreed, the Journal of the American Medical Association declared itself against abortion in the case of rape since "pregnancy is rare after real rape." For those who take legal abortion for granted, Reagan's work is an eye-opener. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved Professor Leslie J. Reagan graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 1981, and earned an M. A. (1985) and a Ph. D. (1991) from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She became a professor at the University of Illinois in 1992, before which she was a visiting research Fellow at the Institute of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Areas of specialty include the history of medicine, American women's history and sexuality. She has been published in a variety of scholarly journals (including Bulletin of the History of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, and Journal of American History) and her book, When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (1997) received numerous awards, including the Presidents Award for the Social Science History Association, the Law and Society Association's James Willard Hurst Prize for Best Book in Legal History, and the Choice Outstanding Book of the Year. (Bowker Author Biography) |
