19th century to the present. Its also som hard to lecture about now because its i as as professor lawson said in one of the main historians of this stuff, and im also living through it with all of you. So its a strange time to be discussing this as history when its also very much real life. So i think now often when we think ofro and we think of them in the context of criminalization and criminal laws, but thats a relatively recent phenomenon. So if you go back far enough and theres a spute about this that was reflected by the supreme in the Supreme Courts decision in 2022 in dobbs versus jackson, Womens Health organization, the majority led by Justice Samuel alito suggested that in the United States to some degree, another abortion had always been a■u crime. Any point in pregnancy, he might have said or might have believed something similar about contraception. But the reality was that for much of United States history, either passing or implementing criminal laws regarding reproduction would have been very difficult, in part because it was all but impossible. Identify when someone was pregnant before quickening, or the point at which Fetal Movement could detected distinguishing a drug was a contraceptive, an abortion people who were having irregular was all but impossible and. Physicians relied on highly unusual and ineffective methods to test whether someone was pregnant or not touching. Abdomen was considered off limits and inappropriate at a time. Women and other people who could get pregnant were often hidden behind screens during, examinations. So physicians to tell people were pregnant would do things like examine noses and mouths, which you might be surprised to learn did not result in reliable diagnoses of pregnancy. So at this time there was a sort of sense that there were female that might influence pregnancy one way or another. And for the most part, state didnt apply until the quickening. The point which abortion was most often criminalized. There exceptions to this there were laws, for example, poison laws that regulated drugs could kill pregnant people early and pregnancy, particularly starting in the 1840sfthigh profile deatm poisonous concoctions used to end pregnancies. There were some states that treated abortion as a misdemeanor for early in pregnancy. There was very little regulation of contraception at all. Until the late 19th century and thatas to change because of two independent social movements. The first was in what we would view as an Antiabortion Movement, though by no means, a fetal Rights Movement thhe mids led by in the American Medical Association, including horatio daughter, whose pictured here, the American Association was new at the time and medical education in general did not in any meaningful way resemble what we would see today. So tre were no real licensure in a modern sense. Medical education was completely and often not very credential ized at all. The difference between a socalled regular physician and a midwife or a homeopath medicines in the pages the was o distinguish, and the doctors in the American Medical Association looking for a way to set themselves apart professionally. They also were worried about what they saw as a grievously birth rate, what they would have viewed as white women, anglo saxon women were having fewer children. And as the 19th century continued, this disparity would only grow. So much so that when it had been normal in the United States famy have eight children, that number would decline to three by the end of the century and disproportionatelyte started worried that decline was coming and families viewed as the best American Families at the same time that families disproportionately catholic having more children. He argued too that life began not at quickening, but at conception, and that only physicians like him physician with the expertise to understand science knew when life began, and that this what distinguished them both morally and, professionally, from the midwives and others who disproportionately been serving pregnant people for the centuries before. Storer lobbied for laws that would punish not physicians for performing abortions, but patients for procuring them. Use his word abortioonymous with miscarriage so the crime he proposed was the crime of procuring an abortion or miscarriage a crime that he proposed should be punished the most harshly when a patient was married, because a married person having an abortion was married, person rejecting their duties to their partner or this case he would see their husband as much as it was their duties to the nation. Storer began promoting these laws in state legislatures in the 19th century and gradually convinced legislatures in most states to introduce laws. Although they rejected some of the harshest proposals that were introduced. It was relatively unusual for state laws to authorize felony punishments for abortion seekers and virtually all with the sole exception of new hampshire, included for the life of the pregnant person, something that stoddard also was not concerned about in his proposal storer wasnt alone in wanting to regulate reproduction in this era, this handsome gentleman Anthony Comstock was part of the picture to comstocks proposals were different, though he was not concerned with what he saw as the taking of fetalhe was coh what he saw as obscenity. So Business Model first developed in new york in the late 1860s came about because comstock, his own account, was a compulsive master who worried that exposure to pornography was damaging the nations fabric for young men and women alike. He proposed to new york law that would define a much broader class of material as obscene everything from medical textbooks to involving nudes as as abortion and contraception which he defined as obscene to indeed, not just abortion and contraception, but any remedy for female troubles, as he would put it, because there was, of course no way at the time for anyone to discern consistently whether someone was pregnant or whether drug acted as a contraceptive in abortifacient. In an amended gog for regulating , or is a placebo or a snake oil remedy. Comstocks model that passed in new york in 1868, then quickly Went National with the advice a Supreme Court justice named William Strong comstock went to congress and convinced them to pass the comstock act, which made it a federal crime to. Mail any of the items listed or in the comstock act as well as receive them subject to up to several years in prison and a hefty so comstock perspective was different. He wasnt invested in protection of fetal life. He was invested in stopping sex. He argued that the problem with abortion and contraception was that if people knew they would available were available, they would what he called incentives to be able, as she put it to conceal their sin because they would be able to have sex without consent winces. And so both of these■ state comstock laws. This was an era when for the first time state laws many parts of the nation criminalized Birth Control, many of them on comstock model. And significantly, there was a close connection between reproductive rights and freedom of speech. Co only the mailing of items used for things like contraception and abortion, but information about one. So there was always a sense that telling people about how you could get these things or how you could do these things was as deeply problematic, in his view, as the doing of the things themselves. In the 19th century, though, was hardly a period in which people contraception. Indeed, the birth rate continued to plummet as states began implementing both bans and many comstock laws and as comstock enforced the comstock act in increasingly ludicrous ways, including, for example, confiscatingts to donors of suppression societies for the suppression of vice like his own because they had reported on existence of things like abortion in contrace that e arresting people for abortion and contraception was obscene because then people would aware of abortion and contraception. Said that, of course, in the 19th century, it seems as abortions were actually increasing, use was increasing too. And so there was sort of an uneasy compromise that emerged where americans having abortions and using contraception. But no one was really arguing that there was right to do either one or that either should be legal. At the same time, advocates for abortion bans were arguing that fetuses or unborn children but g that abortion laws were liberal, were unconstitutional either. This was kind of a Constitution Free time, and that began to change gradually in part because of another movement that would have a strong effect on reproductive rights and justice down the road. The Eugenics Movement, eugenics, as it concept was a term coined by francis galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin in the late 19th centy. And the idea galton had was that if you could breed livestock to improve its genetic qualities, why not breed . As galton wrote, human beings to have better genetic■8 quaties and exactly what eugenics would mean legally complicated for some time. So some scholars and legal argued that there should be lel right sort of people to get married. There were, for example, better baby contests where the purported genetic quality of infants would be rewarded with cash or apple pies and of course, there were much more interesting whats called negative eugenics, right . Usin unquote, wrong people from having children initially. Some of these laws focused on access to marriage, on the theory that ifrom sexually transmitted infections, they shouldnt get married. But then, of course, reformers quickly realized that people could have children and have sex without getting married and turned instead to compulsory, sterilized zation laws which are on the books were on the books in more than 30 states in the United States, including california, which was one of the nations leaders, compulsory sterilization. These laws applied to people we now recognize asaving Mental Illnesses or disabilities, but to a much larger of persons as well. California, for example, often targeted persons who were promie theory that sexual promiscuity, particularly in women, was a sign of feeble or genetic unfitness. Overwhelmingly, the people targeted by these laws were already in state institutions. They were overwhelmingly low income people. Initially, they were overwhelmingly white people, in part because of either disarray or de facto segregation, ensuring that people of color had no to state institutions or services. All this was to change after world war two, when people, color, particularly black people, made up into majority of sterilizatn victims of sterilization moved south. The Eugenics Movement changed the status quo when it came to abortion and contraception a few ways. Obviously in a sense, the Eugenics Movement was compatible with what had come before because just has been the case with storer or comstock. The message of the Eugenics Movement had that. Of course, it was the role of the state to control who and how, albeit a different way. The claim of authority from eugenic of eugenicists was not moral. Comstocks was, or even christian. It was. It in scientific expertise, ■ eugecs simply do better than everyone else. Argument went about who should reproduce. On the other hand, the idea eugenicists was that more reproduce was not always an unmitigated good and in fact that certain circumstances it may make sense for certain people not to have at all or not to have children, and that the cost of having children, not just to the individual but to the state, was something that the state take an interest in. It was at this time that first Birth Control movement organized and that movement had, to varying degrees, involvement in the Eugenic Movement itself. So you see your pictured margaret sanger, some of you, most of you know, as the figure who coined the term Birth Control, the founder of planned parenthood, who began her career in the 19 teens connecting Birth Control to socialism and the rights of workers and transition in part to in trying to enlistuo were at the time enjoyed popular backing across the ideological spectrum. Everyonecatholic activists to mf congress themselves as supporters of eugenics. And sanger, who was deeply pragmatic, believed that her cause, which she saw as an individual right to Birth Control, would be more popular if it were embraced by eugenicists, too, some of her colleagues, including mary, were denette, whos pictured to her, rejected this idea courting eugenicists and instead framed Birth Control as an issue of dennett argued that it was unreasonable to assume, under the comstock act, that americans were incompetent to decide for themselves when to have children, much less when to consume information about Birth Control, and that it was inconsistent with the idea of demoacy to patronize americans in this way and to deny them this kind of information. The fight for Birth Control gained outside of white community. Two prominent activists like w. E. B. Dubois and mary church terrell, whos pictured here, endorsed use of Birth Control in their communities, even as Birth Control, like many of the era, had ties to eugenics. The Birth Control movement, the most part, didnt embrace idea of a right to abortion at all, although precisely what it was embracing complicated at a time when no knew how drugs worked. So common that were marketed at the time like a miss lydia of pinkhams remedy, for example, were sold as contraceptives and abortifacients, and many viewed them as placebos. That didnt work at all so precisely a right to Birth Control would entitle you to was ambiguous, even if no one was endorsing abortion on its face. In fact, if anything, sanger argued that abortions which were dangerouat the time one of the leading sources of maternal and morbidity would result part because access to contraception was denied. There had also been an unspoken consensus about how criminal abortion laws would be implemented that had applied for this era overwhelmingly when abortion was justified, had been left to discretion of physicians voke exceptions for the life of the patient. But the difference between and health of the patient in 19th and early 20th centuries was nonexistent at a time when Maternal Mortality morbidity rates were high. Even compared to the shameful current standards for Maternal Mortality and so upshot tended o be that physicians were rarely prosecuted for abortion unless a patient actually died and often were prosecuted using the dying declaration or dying words of the patient themselves as competent practitioners by. Contrast were rarely prosecuted at, and even those who did face prosecution and often werent facing long sentences and sometimes came to practicing abortions after their prison ended. After the 1940s, this changed pretty dramatically for a few different■7 reaso first, it was longer easy to deny that abortions occurring in the 1930s rates of contraceptive and abortion use incased exponentially during the great depression. Abortion were still unsafe, as was pregnancy and entire hospital wards were dedicated to people suffering the complications of illegal abortions. So the idea that abortion is just not something happens here was no longer possible to maintain. At the same time, prosecutors began to see abortion is more of a problem in the aftermath of world war two, at a time when, americans were encouraged to have bigger families as part of the war effort and the of the country after the war being pro baby and having big family was seen as kind of antidote to communism at a time when the soviet union had legalized abortion and■ families and working women was seen as disturbing utterly unamerican and unchristian. Providers were seen as distinctly unamerican and unchristian as well. It was in this era that abortion providers began deeming abortion providers excuse me, prosecutors began deeming abortion providers racketeers term that was often used for organized. And on occasion this was accurate because abortion was illegal, there organized crime figures in certain instances were involved in access to abortion. But most often it was a term applied to any abortion provider, including grandmothers and other people helping family members have abortions. And as this happened, as abortion prosecutions began occurring there were also questions about how this was intersecting the politics of illegitimacy and race. This was an era people who had children out of wedlock who were white were often sent to maternity homes where they would give birth and have those children adopted by others to conceal that. They had had a lapse for what was a what was perceived as morality. By contrast, people of color who were having children out wedlock were not seen as viewing as lapsing for morality in the same way or were punished in different ways. So this an era as the 1960s began when states like began considering proposals to steriled who, had more than one child out of wedlock overwhelmed, a law that was intending to target welfare recipients who are people color. And when discussion out of wedlock pregnancies became a different way of expressing racial animus, all of this was in the background when it finally i think you began to see reprint action as a constitutional right, this case, griswold versus connecticut began with a mini comstock law, the most egregious of its kind, the era. Connecticut had a ban on married contraception, and this was no