For the past two years I have been running "Abortion Rap" work-
shops with young women in the reproductive freedom movement.
Abortion Without Apology grows out of this work. It uses history to
encourage a new generation of activists to envision what they really
want, and to empower them to take action to get it.

The stories of the women in this pamphlet are in danger of being
lost to history. If their stories are hidden, contemporary activists will be
left without an understanding of how we arrived at this critical moment
in history, and will be forced to reinvent the wheel. Knowledge of the
history of abortion policies and politics is critical to today's reproductive
freedom movement.

Until the early 1880s, when most states passed severe anti-abortion
laws for the first time, abortion was not illegal in this country. The
evolution of anti-abortion policy was shaped primarily by the develop-
ing medical profession. With the establishment in 1847 of the American
Medical Association (AMA), doctors gained an organizational and lob-
bying vehicle through which to mount effective legislative pressure.
They succeeded eventually in outlawing most abortions, a situation that
remained unchanged and virtually unchallenged for nearly a century.

Their even more ambitious crusade to monopolize the female
health care market is well documented in books on the history of women
and medicine (see Bibliography). In the early decades of the 19th
century, "regular" physicians (the elite who had been to even a few
months of medical school) had begun to perceive female patients as the
gateway to family practice—and they saw "irregular" physicians
(homeophaths and others critical of the European-trained "regulars")
and midwives as obstacles in their paths. Discrediting these practitioners,
who had traditionally provided obstetrical and gynecological care—in-
cluding abortion—was their ticket to the higher status (and incomes)
delivered by professionalization.

At the same time, the developing white middle class elaborated a
"cult of domesticity." This set of ideas about gender's place in social life
specified that men and women inhabited separate spheres: women were
in charge of the private sphere of household and family while men
controlled the rest. For women, this division of labor encouraged quality

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