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When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24 and the state allowed the criminalization of abortion in America, all everyone agreed was a historic decision. Unfortunately for America, the history it was based on was largely fake. The ruling, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, written by Judge Samuel Alito, claims that by reversing Roe v Wade, the court is restoring the U.S. to “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion under penalty of criminal punishment [that] of the earliest days of common law until 1973,” when Roe legalized abortion. However, this claim can easily be refuted. As historians have explained at length, early American customary law (as in Britain) generally permitted abortions to time when the fetus ‘got going’ or observable movement of the fetus, usually between 16 and 20 weeks after gestation.Connecticut was the first state to ban abortion after speeding up, in 1821, which is about two centuries after the earliest days It wasn’t until the 1880s that every US state had a set of laws restricting abortion, and it wasn’t until the 1880s. by the 1910s it was criminalized in every state. In the wake of Dobbs, social media was flooded with examples from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers that clearly disproved Alito’s false claim, with examples of midwives and doctors legally promoting abortions, Benjamin Franklin’s home abortion remedies, and records of 19th – century doctors who performed “therapeutic” (medically necessary) abortions.

Dobbs’ erroneous claims about the history of the US abortion law are one of the many reasons why it is so controversial. It may be the most divisive ruling since 1857, when the Supreme Court found that Dred Scott, who had been enslaved and sued for his freedom, had no standing in the US federal courts as a black man. Dred Scott’s decision was a casus belli of the American Civil War four years later, and there are many reasons to fear Dobbs could be divisive.

Another immediate cause of the Civil War was the Fugitive Slave Act, which prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe to write what was until 1936 the most popular American novel ever, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which chronicled the cruelty of slavery and the madness of the fugitive slave laws. were convicted. The Fugitive Slave Act forced states to return enslaved people to their slaves, even if they lived in free states that did not recognize slavery, and provided financial incentives to return people to slavery. It was this division that led Lincoln to deliver his famous “house divided” speech, in which he said that a nation could not tolerate half slave and half free: because an individual’s human rights changed drastically from state to state. Dobbs has created a situation for pregnant women analogous to the fugitive slave laws, with the bounty hunter laws it has allowed in states like Idaho and Texas, where women can be prosecuted by the state in which they reside for obtaining an abortion outside his borders. It will cause legal chaos and conflict between states, as battles over extradition and a state’s legal rights beyond its own borders are sure to erupt again.

But there’s another lesser-known cause for all of this in Civil War America. While most people today assume that anti-abortion laws were motivated by moral or religious beliefs about a fetus’ right to life, that’s far from the whole story. In fact, the first wave of anti-abortion laws were mired in arguments about nativism, eugenics, and white supremacism, as they joined a cultural panic that engulfed the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a result of the massive changes in American society caused by the conflict. This panic was called “racing suicide” in shorthand at the time.

The increasing traction of the far-right “great replacement theory,” which holds that there is a global conspiracy to replace white people with people of color, and which has explicitly led to massacres by white supremacists in the US, is often said to have originated with a French novel called The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. Published in 1973, the same year Roe v Wade enshrined American women’s right to reproductive autonomy, it is a dystopian account of “black hordes” of immigrants storming into and destroying Western civilization. But there was much earlier panic about “white extinction,” and in the US, debates about abortion were mired in racial panic from the outset. The struggle to criminalize abortion may have gone on successfully as a moral crusade, but its origins are rooted in a political one. having more babies to protect “native” American society from “declining birth rates.” He spoke to Americans that “deliberate childlessness” made people “guilty” of being “criminals against race”. Roosevelt gave speeches stating, “I believe in children. I want to see enough of it and of the right kind.”

Dobbs’ view explicitly rejects arguments that anti-abortion laws were historically motivated by eugenic nativism, rather than by religious or moral beliefs. It says the opposition could produce only “one prominent proponent” of the idea that previous anti-abortion laws were driven by “the fear that Catholic immigrants had more babies than Protestants and that the availability of abortion was causing white Protestant women to “deprive their mothers.” evade duty.’” But even a cursory survey of American discourse a century ago shows how utterly pervasive this idea was, as newspapers, lectures, and sermons warned that abortion would mean that Catholics and other foreign-born immigrants would outnumber Catholics and other foreign-born immigrants. To take just one example out of thousands, a 1903 editorial on population statistics noted that the Protestant population of the US grew by 8.1%, while the Catholic population grew by 21.8%. This “alarming state of things” was echoed by doctors who reported “average more than five abortions a month, none of them in Catholic families.” The piece was headlined “Religion and Race Suicide”.

As a concept, “racing suicide” goes back to the aftermath of the Civil War. The fundamental problem of primogeniture – ensuring the legitimacy of property succession in a male-dominated society – took an even nastier turn in a slave society. Under the laws of American slavery, the more children a black woman produced, the more human capital her slave trader acquired, while the more white children a white woman produced, the more political capital white men accumulated in a representative democracy in which only white men voted. and made laws on behalf of all white citizens. But the civil war and the civil rights amendments that followed have turned the legal basis for that old racial and gender hierarchy on its head. They would have to be rebuilt and control the reproduction of Protestant white women to ensure that the reproduction of the Protestant elite was central to that project.

The war had devastated a generation of white men, with estimates of about 750,000 dead, or 2.5% of the population, as the ratio of white men to women plummeted after the war. White women gained more and more self-determination and forced their way into higher education and professions. (Men fought back: As historians have shown, when American male physicians professionalized in the mid-1800s, one of their projects was to stifle competition by undermining the legitimacy of midwives and nurse practitioners in caring for pregnant women. and their sole control over women’s reproduction, including supporting anti-abortion laws except when under their care.) Contraception and medical standards improved, while urban industrialization diminished the need for large families to work on farms. As a result, the fertility rates of white Americans declined rapidly in the 19th century, with families averaging seven children in 1800, falling to four in 1900. A newly emancipated racial “underclass” suddenly changed the power structures of the country, even as massive waves of immigration loomed. undermine Anglo-Saxon cultural and political dominance.

“racial suicide”, which already existed as an expression, soon became an abbreviation for the protection of “white purity”. The phrase was used in the former Southern states to describe mixed-race marriages: An 1884 editorial denounced anyone who “approves of mixing” for tolerating “the great shame and crime of racial suicide.” It was invoked to limit Asian immigration: to allow “coole competition,” wrote a 1900 editorial in frankly racist terms, “is committing racial suicide.”

Soon, spokesmen for the patriarchal class (politicians, doctors, preachers, and professors) were making explicit claims about the racial obligations of Protestant adults to maintain their political dominance.

When Roosevelt and other prominent figures such as sociologist Edward A Ross heeded the cry, a panic over “racial suicide” began to engulf the nation, as elite Americans discussed explicitly how to maintain political dominance as their numbers dwindled. Anti-racial suicide clubs were formed when students from Ivy League universities pledged to have no fewer than five children. In 1918, the US Army’s campaign for sexual “hygiene” among soldiers included an educational film called “Beware of Race Suicide!” Meanwhile, editorials across America called on lawmakers to “prevent the terrible waste of life currently so great from abortions and stillbirths: and, more importantly, to deny the right to marriage to the hopelessly ill and unfit.” The argument was downright eugenic; it soon became the best-selling books, such as Madison Grant’s 1916 The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler called his bible.

When the resurgent Ku Klux Klan paraded in Louisiana in 1922, they carried banners that read “White Supremacy,” “America First,” “One Hundred Percent American,” “Race Purity” and “Abortionists, Beware!” People sometimes get confused by the Klan’s animus against abortionists, or attribute it to generalized patriarchal authoritarianism, but it was much more specific about “racial purity”: white supremacy can only be maintained through white reproduction.

Gradually, improvements in medical science had revealed the gradual development of a human fetus and eliminated the simpler idea of ​​enlivening, as moral and existential questions about the beginning of human life became more complex. By the late 1920s and 1930s, the successful criminalization of abortion had sent it underground, claiming to protect the purity of white women. By 1938, abortion had become so synonymous with the phrase that a movie about a criminal abortion ring that preys on young women was titled Race Suicide.

In a forgotten 1928 bestseller called Bad Girl, a married young white woman contemplates an abortion to preserve her freedom; after deciding to keep the baby, she casually uses a racist slur when she thinks of the black moms she’ll have to share a ward with: “But I guess you don’t care who your neighbors are once the pain kicks in.” ‘ she looks back. . The same point is made from an anti-racist perspective in Langston Hughes’ 1936 story Cora Unashamed, in which a white girl dies from the abortion her mother forces her to undergo rather than see her give birth to a Greek immigrant’s child. Cora, the black protagonist, though racially and economically subdued, has at least given birth to her own illegitimate mixed-race child, free from this deadly hypocrisy.

It was the same year that Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind, which replaced Uncle Tom’s Cabin as America’s bestseller. Nor is it a tale of slavery and the civil war by chance, although instead of condemning slavery, it defends it and condemns the war that ended it. However, the plot of Gone With the Wind is less driven by war than pregnancy and childbirth. Melanie Wilkes barely survives her first birth, but dies after a subsequent miscarriage. Scarlett miscarries, loses a daughter and considers an abortion in an alleyway.

This focus on the dangers of pregnancy for 19th-century women is part of Gone With the Wind’s white feminism, but it is also inextricably linked to white supremacism. Melanie will not move north after the war because her son would go to school with Yankees and black children. Wanting her children to testify and exercise power, she teaches them to hate the Yankees, “who have let the dark ones rule us, who rob us and keep our men from voting!” Scarlett thinks in similar terms when considering her plantation Tara, “the red earth that cotton would bear for their sons and their sons’ sons.” Meanwhile, Rhett’s love for the daughter he forcibly prevents Scarlett from aborting is more than fatherly adoration and displaced love for Scarlett. Mitchell also makes it clear that Rhett’s devotion to his daughter is a reflection of his devotion to his people—his race—and his determination not to let them die.

By 1939, the year Gone With the Wind premiered as a movie, the subtext of “racial suicide” had become apparent. A California newspaper reported the latest population statistics, stating that “the suicidal prophecies about race we’ve heard for years seem unjustified” because “there is clearly life in the white race.”

Fifteen years later, the United States launched another periodic wave of violence in the ongoing struggle for civil rights and multiracial democracy. Another landmark Supreme Court ruling, Brown v Board of Education in 1954, desegregated U.S. public schools. In response, social conservatives began setting up private Christian schools, which also happened to be all-white. As late as 1968, evangelicals at a symposium refused to denounce abortion as a sin, “citing individual health, family well-being and social responsibility as justifications for terminating a pregnancy.” But with Roe’s passage in 1973, the picture changed as more and more single women began to exercise their rights to physical autonomy. At the same time, the Nixon administration decided to abolish the tax-exempt status of segregated white Christian schools, leading leading social conservatives to look for a wedge issue. As historians have shown, archival correspondence reveals that they found in abortion a socially acceptable pretext for a struggle that would mobilize social conservatives and enable them to fight for the white Christian patriarchy as they understood it, reproducing their dominance.

The day after Dobbs revoked American women’s right to reproductive autonomy, Republican Congresswoman Mary Miller of Illinois publicly thanked Donald Trump, “on behalf of all of the MAGA patriots in America,” for bringing to court the judges who ” the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court.” She later claimed it was a slip of the tongue, but the crowd cheered nonetheless. Anyone shocked by this reaction to the injection of race into a so-called women’s rights decision knows the history of the abortion law in America not. It has always been a struggle not only over the reproduction of women, but also over the reproduction of political power – because in a (supposed) representative democracy, power is a function of the population. women are part of the wider movement to reclaim the “leading place” in society for a small minority of patriarchal bl anke men. And, as Alito’s decision shows, where no legal precedent and other justifications can be found, the myth will fill the vacuum.

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