Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (1498)	10/7/2000 4:52:50 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

theatlantic.com Common Law and the Criminalization of Abortion Abortion was not always a crime. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, abortion of early pregnancy was legal under common law. Abortions were illegal only after "quickening," the point at which a pregnant woman could feel the movements of the fetus (approximately the fourth month of pregnancy). The common law's attitude toward pregnancy and abortion was based on an understanding of pregnancy and human development as a process rather than an absolute moment. Indeed, the term abortion referred only to the miscarriages of later pregnancies, after quickening. What we would now identify as an early induced abortion was not called an abortion at all. If an early pregnancy ended, it had "slipp[ed] away," or the menses had been "restored." At conception and the earliest stage of pregnancy before quickening, no one believed that a human life existed; not even the Catholic Church took this view. Rather, the popular ethic regarding abortion and common law were grounded in the female experience of their own bodies. Colonial and early-nineteenth-century women, historians have learned, perceived conception as the "blocking" or "obstructing" of menstruation, which required attention. The cessation of the menses indicated a worrisome imbalance in the body and the need to bring the body back into balance by restoring the flow. This idea of menstruation corresponded with medical and popular understanding of sickness and health. The body was a delicate system of equilibrium that could easily be thrown out of balance -- by a change in weather or diet, for example -- and that then needed to be restored through active intervention. A disruption in the healthy body, in the worldview of patients and physicians, required a visible, often violent, physical response to treatment in order to restore equilibrium. This theory underlay eighteenth and nineteenth-century regular medical practice, which emphasized heroic measures -- bleeding, blistering, purging, and puking -- in response to sickness. The response to the blocking of the menses was part of this shared understanding of the body: women took drugs in order to make their menses regular and regarded the ensuing vomiting and evacuation as evidence of the drugs' effective action. Restoring the menses was a domestic practice. The power of certain herbs to restore menstruation was widely known. One colonial woman who feared pregnancy had "twice taken Savin; once boyled in milk and the other time strayned through a Cloath." Savin, derived from juniper bushes, was the most popular abortifacient and easily acquired since junipers grew wild throughout the country. Other herbs used as abortifacients included pennyroyal, tansy, ergot, and seneca snakeroot. Slave women used cottonroot. Many of these useful plants could be found in the woods or cultivated. in gardens, and women could refer to home medical guides for recipes for "bringing on the menses." Both of these concepts, blocked menses and quickening, must be taken seriously by late-twentieth-century observers. Blocked menses cannot be dismissed as an excuse made by women who knew they were pregnant. Quickening was a moment recognized by women and by law as a defining moment in human development. Once quickening occurred, women recognized a moral obligation to carry the fetus to term. This age-old idea underpinned the practice of abortion in America. The legal acceptance of induced miscarriages before quickening tacitly assumed that women had a basic right to bodily integrity. Abortion- as we know it today- was not called abortion, so there was no crime of "abortion" as we understand it, for termination of ANY stage of the fetus. This is the book I own:Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America There are several other good books in this area. If you are interested in this area you could read some of them.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (1498)	10/7/2000 5:55:21 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10042

Effectively, Roe v. Wade codefied the English common law precedent with regard to the status of the unborn fetus after the period of "quickening" and providing the state the ability to limit, OR criminalize, 2nd and 3rd term abortions. Wrong. Effectively Roe vs Wade and further Supreme Court decisions which followed prevent states from outlawing abortion at any time during a pregnancy. Not just during the first trimester, but even in the third. Tim