Commentary: In its obsession to repeal Roe vs. Wade, the GOP has become the anti-woman party especially with regards to abortion. Interestingly 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). Abortion was not just legal—it was a safe, condoned, and practiced procedure in colonial America and appeared in the legal and medical records of the period.
In 1856 misguided pro-life advocate Dr. Horatio Storer established a national drive ( "physicians' crusade against abortion" ) by the American Medical Association (AMA) to end legal abortion. First trimester abortion at this point (in most states) was legal or a misdemeanor. He blamed the woman for all pregnancies. In 1868, his main concern was whether or not the American West would "be filled by our own children or by those of aliens (immigrants)." He crazily stated: "This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation." Storer's solution was to require women of European stock to carry pregnancies to term and make abortion a crime.
The GOP wants us to the return to the hideous world of Horatio Storer that made abortion illegal and dangerous. This was the era of the back-alley abortion, of the coat hanger, which claimed thousands of lives of women annually.