Abortion Before Roe
Before Roe, both legal and illegal abortion posed an alarming risk to women's health.
- Abortion was not a crime and was quite common in the U.S. during the 1700s and early 1800s. During this period, primitive methods such as physically striking a pregnant woman's abdomen or introducing foreign objects into the uterus were used to induce abortion, frequently killing or injuring the woman
- The mid-1800s campaign to criminalize abortion stemmed from the medical profession's desire to establish the supremacy of physicians over midwives and homeopaths and an increasing resentment towards the growing women's rights movement
- Laws passed across the country between 1860 and 1880 prohibited abortion at any point during pregnancy. However, illegal (back-alley) abortion remained widely available throughout the next century
- Approximately 50% of all maternal deaths resulted from illegal abortion during the first half of the 20th century
- Estimates of the annual number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 60s range from 200,000 to 1.2 million, even though abortion procedures were unsafe and often life-threatening, in addition to being illegal
- During the 1950s and 60s, each year an estimated 160 to 260 women died from illegal abortions, while thousands more were seriously injured
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Abortion After Roe
The Supreme Court's historic Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 secured the right to safe and legal abortion in the U.S. Although the legalization of abortion has led to many important improvements in the lives of women and families, this right remains vulnerable.
- Legal abortion is credited with decreasing both maternal and infant mortality. Today, abortion is 11 times safer than childbirth and less than 1% of those who undergo abortion procedures experience major complications
- Abortion is now one of the most commonly performed clinical procedures, and the current death rate from abortion is 0.6 per 100,000 procedures. Comparably, the death rate from childbirth is 8 deaths per 100,000 live births. However, only 12% of U.S. medical schools teach first-trimester abortion procedures
- Each year, half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended and half of these are terminated by abortion
- 86% of all U.S. counties have no abortion provider, and approximately 32% of all women of child-bearing age (15-44) live in these counties
- Over the last three decades, abortion opponents have pushed for state legislation restricting access to abortion, including parental involvement requirements, mandatory counseling and waiting periods, and limitations on public funding
- Since 1977, there have been over 59,000 acts of violence at U.S. abortion clinics, including 7 murders, 41 bombings, 343 death threats, and 942 acts of vandalism
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