When and why did Americans start the conversation of abortion as a public issue? It wasn’t always this way. According to the Organization of American Historians (OAH), up until 1840, a time when transportation was on foot or horses and 80+ percent of Americans were practicing Christians, American women were charged only with a misdemeanor for an abortion in the “post-quickening stage” (between four to six months, when the mother could feel the fetus moving.) The OAH says this misdemeanor was to protect the health of the woman, which was threatened by a late-stage abortion. In addition, only the women themselves could testify to fetal movement, a telling attribute of the privacy and respect a female and her family had at this time regarding pregnancy. According to the OAH’s recent article “Abolishing Abortion”: “Before 1840, abortion was a widespread, largely stigma-free experience for American women.” I do not understand how American women over 180 years ago had more reproductive choice than they do today. How did we go backward in kindness and privacy as we went forward in time and science?

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My AP Language & Composition class just finished reading Beloved, by Toni Morrison. As a follow up, we watched her 2019 documentary, The Pieces I Am. While watching the film, it stuck out to me the most when Toni Morrison said (rough quote): “Parents have the right to decide what their children are allowed to read. But they do not have the right to decide what my children are and are not allowed to read.” This resonated with me, and I’m sure it did with everyone else in the room, because of how relevant the concept of “book-banning” has become today. Freshman year when we read Fahrenheit 451, that concept seemed possible only in an obviously dystopian world. But today, schools around us are banning books left and right, and sometimes it really does feel as though we are living in a dystopia described by Ray Bradbury.

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