Someone Should Write a Book about Abortions Before Roe

When I first started this blog about ten years ago, I mentioned in passing that there were as many abortions before they were legalized as there have been since in Roe legalized abortion across the U. S. I had read and heard this so many times I assumed everyone else know this to be the case. Did I ever get an ear full. "That's false propaganda from the 'abortion industry'" many wrote on the comment page.

Eventually, I figured out that force birth propagandists, including the Catholic Church, have been peddling the notion for years there were only a handful of abortions each year in the U.S. There were also a handful of prosecutions, many half a dozen across the entire U.S. per year. The forced birth propagandists claimed the only abortions that happened were detected and prosecuted. The facts are otherwise. 

Across the U.S. are hospital archives with records of many thousands of young women admitted for reproductive organ infections. No reputable researcher attributes these, or nearly all of them, to any cause except botched abortions. Maybe Catholic hospitals, which must have thousands of these infection cases in their files, are prohibited from attributing them to abortions.  Maybe the attribute them to inferior toilet paper.

My late friend, Roy C. Pedersen, grew up on the streets of Fargo, ND. Doctors back then had practices attached to their homes. Our family doctor in a small Iowa town had an office like this. Pedersen said all the kids knew which doctors did quiet abortions.

The best seller from 20 years ago, The Story of Jane; The legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, told of an underground abortion service that operated in Chicago for several years. It rented different apartments and kept moving around. Those involved estimated they performed 11,000 abortions before it was closed because of the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

I'm reading a book just now, American Visions: 1800-1850. It is a new book and the author is a professional historian. He pours over books and news papers trying to determine the direction of the country's mindset in the 50 years before the Civil War. He spent several pages reviewing the national debate about abortion in the decade of the 1840's. He found frequent advertisements in news papers and magazines offering abortion services. Abortions were not illegal and were offered by both doctors and midwives. 

There is one word that describes the forced birth propaganda that abortions were not common before Roe. The word is bull$hit.