Plenty of people still got abortions in the United States before Roe v. Wade federally protected abortion rights in 1973. 

According to one estimate by the Saturday Evening Post in 1961, between 750,000 and 2 million abortions were performed each year. Abortions happened in two different circumstances: either in hospitals, where individual women were approved for abortion care based on medical or psychological necessity; or in illegal settings dubbed “back-alley” operations (or “abortion rings”). 

Miscarriages were one indication for abortion care (medically, the procedure for both is the same), as were other life-threatening complications like ectopic pregnancy. Some people could also get approved for an abortion if licensed mental health professionals wrote a letter attesting that continuing the pregnancy would threaten their sanity.  

My new book, Given No Choice: A History of Abortion Rights, traces the evolution of abortion worldwide since antiquity through modern times. In researching that history while chronicling the modern abortion rights movement in my newsletter, Repro Rights Now, I was struck by a sense that the past is seemingly repeating itself. 

The U.S. hasn’t returned to the exact pre-Roe reality since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision deprived people of the constitutional right to abortion care in 2022. But we have seen a resurgence of the murky situation in which people must justify their need for abortion care to doctors or legal professionals. 

When medicine and law collided

During my book research, I had a particularly poignant conversation with Sherri Chessen, who sought an abortion in Arizona in 1962 due to fatal fetal abnormalities. 

Early in pregnancy, Chessen had taken thalidomide, a sedative commonly prescribed for sleeplessness and morning sickness. This drug was later shown to harm the physical development of the fetus, but Chessen didn’t know that until she was 11 weeks pregnant. 

Chessen’s OB-GYN agreed she should get an abortion, and had arranged for the procedure to be done at Good Samaritan Hospital (now Banner – University Medical Center). 

Chessen wanted to warn more people about the danger thalidomide posed to pregnant people, which had only recently become public. So she went to the media. Rather than on the risks of the medication, however, her local paper, the Arizona Republic, focused its article on the abortion itself. 

After the coverage, Chessen received threatening letters from anti-abortion zealots that mentioned harming her children. The Vatican condemned her choice. Media outlets across the country covered her situation, including Life magazine, which published a pictorial spread. 

The hospital committee that had approved Chessen’s abortion rescinded permission. Chessen then went to two psychiatrists to get documentation to show that terminating the pregnancy was in the best interest of her mental health. After a court wouldn’t greenlight the abortion, she flew to Sweden to get the care she needed. 

The obstacles Chessen faced helped galvanize the abortion rights movement, which reached its peak in the late 1960s. Reproductive freedom was one of the central tenets of second-wave feminism. 

While Chessen’s story got more media........

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