In 2007, after Paul Ross Evans pleaded guilty to leaving a bomb outside of a women’s health clinic in Austin, he assured the judge: He never meant for anyone to get hurt. “Except,” he clarified, “for the abortionists.”
For almost two centuries, the moniker “abortionist” has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence. Before Roe v. Wade, the label turned midwives and doctors into criminals to be cracked down on by the state. After the 1973 decision, right-wing movements continued to deploy the term to imply only back-alley doctors performed abortions.
In 2022, the sobriquet showed up once more in the halls of power: “Abortionist” was used four times in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, channeling a fraught history.
Until the late 1800s, abortion and reproductive health were primarily handled by women—midwives, many of whom were Black, Indigenous, or immigrants. As medicine professionalized, male doctors viewed this skilled group as a threat to their business. Birth, they argued, ought to take place in a hospital. “The midwife is a relic of barbarism,” Dr. Joseph DeLee, a prominent 20th century obstetrician, proclaimed, “a drag on the progress of the science and art of obstetrics.”
The restructuring of gynecological medicine went hand in hand with a budding movement to criminalize abortion. In 1860, governors of every state received a letter from the president of a young organization, the American Medical Association. Ghostwritten by Horatio Storer, a Harvard-educated surgeon, the letter was part of an AMA campaign touting a new idea: Abortion should be illegal because life begins at conception—not, as previous laws considered, at “quickening,” when fetal movements are first detected. Under this logic, as Storer made it his mission to convince the masses, practically all abortions should be a crime.
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