Decrease and Stultify

Both these books are case studies in the ironic implications of social change. The title of James Reed's work proclaims the central irony of the history of birth control, as contraception emerged from tabooed obscurity in the nineteenth century to become a widely approved, even urgently demanded, practice in the twentieth century. James C. Mohr's account of abortion policy highlights ironies less familiar but no less dramatic. Today right-to-life groups, composed largely of Roman Catholics, condemn the medical establishment for its apparent indifference to fetal life and its refusal actively to resist the campaign for relaxation of antiabortion laws. But as Mohr's lucid essay amply demonstrates, those very laws were first put on the books in the nineteenth century at the behest of organized medicine, and the campaign to enact them was prompted in significant measure by fears of nativists that oldstock Protestants, increasingly inclined to practice abortion, were being outbred by prolific immigrant Catholics. Until well into the last century, abortion was nowhere in the United States the subject of legislation. By 1900 virtually every jurisdiction in the country had enacted statutory restrictions on abortion. Mohr chronicles that dramatic shift in policy, and adds an illuminating postscript on the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which substantially reapplied early-nineteenth-century legal norms to the question of abortion. Before American legislatures began to address the subject directly in the 1820s, jurists assessed the legal status of abortion according to traditional British common law doctrine. Central to that doctrine (and to all of Mohr's argument), was the phenomenon of quickening, the first perceived motion

Abortion · Biology · Obstetrics · Political science · Pregnancy · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Medicine · Reproductive Health and Contraception · Reproductive Health and Technologies