=====Abortion - History=====

This article traces the practice and regulation of ending a pregnancy before birth, from antiquity to the present, across legal, medical, and religious contexts. For the underlying subject, see [[abortion]]. For present-day arguments and disputes, see [[abortion-general-consensus]] and the viewpoint pages linked throughout. This article describes what happened and when; it does not evaluate the practice or adjudicate its morality.

===== Antiquity =====

Methods of ending a pregnancy - herbal preparations, physical means, and surgical intervention - are documented in the medical and legal texts of numerous ancient societies. Egyptian medical papyri, including the Ebers Papyrus (circa 1550 BCE), describe substances used to this end. In China, references appear in texts attributed to the legendary emperor Shennong. Greek and Roman writers described the practice in varying terms depending on the stage of pregnancy and the social status of the woman involved.

Ancient Greek medicine was divided on the question. The Hippocratic Oath, in its classical form, includes a pledge not to give a woman a "pessary to cause abortion," though scholars dispute how widely the Oath was followed in practice and whether it reflected consensus medical ethics or one philosophical school among several; see [[abortion-hippocratic-oath-controversy]]. Aristotle, in his //Politics//, discussed abortion prior to "sense and life" as a means of population control, distinguishing it from abortion after that point. Soranus of Ephesus, a physician of the 1st-2nd century CE, wrote at length on methods and indications in his //Gynecology//, describing disagreement among physicians of his own era.

Roman law did not treat the fetus as a legal person distinct from the pregnant woman for most of the Republican and early Imperial periods; abortion was regulated, where at all, as a matter concerning a husband's interest in offspring rather than as an offense against the fetus itself. This changed under Septimius Severus and Caracalla in the early 3rd century CE, when abortion performed against a husband's wishes was categorized as a crime.

===== Religious and legal frameworks, antiquity to early modern period =====

Jewish legal tradition, as reflected in the Mishnah and later rabbinic commentary, generally held that the fetus did not attain the full legal status of a person until birth, with some sources permitting abortion to save the life of the mother and disagreement among later authorities on other circumstances.

Early Christian writers took varied positions. The Didache (late 1st or early 2nd century) and the Epistle of Barnabas condemned abortion. Augustine of Hippo, following earlier Greek philosophical distinctions, differentiated an unformed from a formed fetus, a distinction that influenced Western Christian thought for centuries. This distinction was formalized in canon law through the concept of "ensoulment" or "quickening" - the point at which the fetus was believed to receive a soul - variously placed at 40 days (male) or 80 days (female) following Aristotelian biology, or simply at the point the woman first felt fetal movement. Under this framework, medieval canon law and the secular law of many European jurisdictions treated abortion before quickening as a lesser offense than abortion after quickening, or not as a punishable offense at all.

Islamic jurisprudence across its major schools similarly debated a permissible window, most commonly before 120 days of gestation, corresponding to a hadith describing successive stages of fetal development, with disagreement among the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali schools on permissible circumstances and timing.

English common law adopted the quickening standard. Sir Edward Coke's early 17th-century writings and William Blackstone's //Commentaries on the Laws of England// (1765-1769) described abortion after quickening as a crime, while treating abortion before quickening as not indictable at common law - a framework inherited by the American colonies and the early United States.

===== Nineteenth-century criminalization =====

Beginning in the early 19th century, English and American law moved to criminalize abortion at all stages of pregnancy, abandoning the quickening distinction. Lord Ellenborough's Act (1803) in England made abortion after quickening a capital offense and abortion before quickening a lesser felony; subsequent English statutes, including the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, extended criminal liability to abortion at any stage.

In the United States, Connecticut criminalized abortion in 1821, and by the 1880s nearly every state had adopted statutes restricting abortion at all stages of gestation, a shift often associated with the American Medical Association's campaign, led by physician Horatio Storer beginning in 1857, against practitioners the AMA regarded as unqualified, and with broader professionalization of medicine. The Comstock Act of 1873 in the United States classified information about abortion and contraception as obscene material barred from the mail. The 2022 Dobbs opinion later observed that by the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, roughly three-quarters of American states had already criminalized abortion at every stage of pregnancy. Some historians attribute this wave of criminalization primarily to medical professionalization and safety concerns, while others emphasize demographic and nativist anxieties of the period; see [[abortion-19th-century-criminalization-controversy]].

===== Twentieth century: restriction and early liberalization =====

For most of the first half of the 20th century, abortion remained illegal in most Western jurisdictions except to preserve the life of the pregnant woman, though enforcement and prevalence of clandestine abortion varied widely. The Soviet Union legalized abortion on request in 1920, the first modern state to do so, then re-criminalized it under Stalin in 1936 before again liberalizing it in 1955. Nazi Germany, by contrast, tightened restrictions on abortion for women deemed racially or eugenically desirable while simultaneously compelling or permitting abortion for groups it targeted for persecution, including forced abortions performed on women in occupied Eastern Europe and on some categories of prisoners.

Following the Second World War, a wave of statutory reform began. Sweden (1938, expanded 1946 and 1974) and the United Kingdom's Abortion Act 1967 permitted abortion under specified medical and social grounds. In the United States, the American Law Institute's 1962 Model Penal Code proposed permitting abortion for cases of rape, incest, fetal defect, or risk to maternal health, and several states, including Colorado, California, and North Carolina, adopted variants of this model beginning in 1967. New York, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington legalized abortion on broader terms by 1970.

===== Roe v. Wade and its aftermath in the United States =====

On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that a woman has a constitutional right to abortion. The Court's opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, grounded this right in a constitutional right to privacy and established a framework tying the permissible scope of state regulation to the trimester of pregnancy. A companion case, //Doe v. Bolton//, decided the same day, addressed procedural restrictions on abortion. In 1992, //Planned Parenthood v. Casey// replaced the trimester framework with an "undue burden" standard while affirming a right to abortion before fetal viability.

Internationally, other jurisdictions liberalized their abortion laws over the following decades on varying terms and timelines, including France (1975), West Germany (1976, later revised), Italy (1978), and Canada, where the Supreme Court struck down the existing federal abortion law in //R. v. Morgentaler// (1988), after which no federal abortion statute remained in force.

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade and Casey and holding that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. The decision, reversing the lower court rulings by a 6-3 vote, with a narrower five-justice majority joining the opinion overturning Roe and Casey outright, returned the authority to regulate abortion to individual states and Congress. In the months following the ruling, a number of states enacted or activated bans or substantial restrictions on abortion, while others expanded legal protections for the procedure; the resulting and continuing variation in state law is addressed on [[abortion-united-states-post-dobbs-history]]. The ruling and its reasoning remain subjects of ongoing legal and political dispute; see [[abortion-roe-v-wade-viewpoint]] and [[abortion-dobbs-v-jackson-viewpoint]].

===== Medical methods over time =====

Surgical dilation and curettage became the predominant clinical method in Western medicine by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, gradually supplemented and in many contexts replaced by vacuum aspiration, developed and adopted in China and the Soviet Union in the 1950s-1960s and subsequently worldwide. Medical (drug-induced) abortion using mifepristone, developed in France and approved there in 1988, followed by misoprostol, spread internationally over the following decades and was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000; its later approval for use via telemedicine and by mail is discussed on [[abortion-medication-mail-controversy]].

===== Controversies =====

  * The historical prevalence and legal status of abortion in classical antiquity and the degree to which the Hippocratic Oath reflected broad medical consensus rather than one philosophical faction remain disputed among classicists; see [[abortion-hippocratic-oath-controversy]].
  * Some historians attribute 19th-century American criminalization primarily to physician professionalization and maternal-safety concerns, while others emphasize demographic and nativist motives among its advocates; see [[abortion-19th-century-criminalization-controversy]].
  * Scholars dispute the extent to which the drafters and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended, or would have anticipated, its application to abortion regulation, a dispute central to the reasoning in both Roe and Dobbs; see [[abortion-fourteenth-amendment-originalism-controversy]].
  * The causes and consequences of the post-Dobbs shift in American abortion law, including its effects on maternal health outcomes and interstate travel for abortion, remain actively contested; see [[abortion-post-dobbs-effects-controversy]].

===== Footnotes =====

  - Aristotle, //Politics//, Book VII, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885).
  - Soranus of Ephesus, //Gynecology//, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956).
  - William Blackstone, //Commentaries on the Laws of England//, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765).
  - James C. Mohr, //Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900// (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
  - Leslie J. Reagan, //When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973// (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
  - Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
  - Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).
  - Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).
  - R. v. Morgentaler, [1988] 1 S.C.R. 30 (Can.).
  - Rickie Solinger, //Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America// (New York: New York University Press, 2005).