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CHAPTER 4. ABORTION DISCOURSE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 64
abortion on moral grounds as early as 1797. Clear moral distinctions were made
between the mother’s life and the life of the fetus:
The public did not consider the embryo “not alive” in the biological sense
.... Rather, public (and much medical opinion) seems to have been that
embryos were, morally speaking simply not as alive as the mother, at least
until quickening – and sometimes later than that, if the pregnancy threatened
the life of the woman (Luker 1984, 26).
On the other hand, Sitaraman (1994, 4) contends that fetuses prior to quickening
were “not considered a human being, and abortions were viewed as a point on the
continuum including contraception,” and suggests that ignorance of pregnancy
and fetal development contributed to the lack of public discussion of abortion.
Public discourse during the criminalization period is dominated by the medical
profession, and it is clear that the voices of women and ordinary citizens were
largely excluded from the limited debate that did occur. One indication of the lack
of public debate during this period is the complete absence of articles concerning
abortion indexed in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature prior to 1890. In
addition, neither the religious nor legal communities appear to have made significant
contributions to the public discussion of the abortion issue. This is surprising,
given the Catholic church’s 1869 papal statement abandoning the distinction between
early and late abortions (Tribe 1990, 31), and given the large number of
new state laws enacted.
By contrast, the newly emergent American Medical Association regularly issued
regular reports and papers urging that decisions about abortion be made by licensed
physicians on the basis of their superior education, technical and moral
standing. In an interesting rhetorical feat, simultaneously claimed “both an absolute
right to life for the embryo (by claiming that abortion is always murder) and
a conditional one (by claiming that doctors have a right to declare some abortions
’necessary’)” (Luker 1984, 32).
During the fifty years following the criminalization period, discussion about abortion
remained by and large confined to medical, legal and religious professionals.
There are no articles indexed under “abortion” Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature
until 1929, and the number of articles from 1929 to 1960 never reached
more than twelve in any year (See Figure 4.1 on the following page). Once the pattern
of criminalization was established, whatever public discourse about abortion