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Abortion Has Always Been an American Tradition

More than one founding father knew that to be truly free, women needed control over their reproduction.

Abortion is older than America, but for the past 250 years, the ability to access it has almost always depended on one’s own ingenuity. Healthcare, including reproductive healthcare, was never promised by the founding fathers. Sure, they suggested that we all deserve “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But the devil is in the details: The colonizers who made that promise in 1776 would go on to commit horrific atrocities and cruel acts of violence and genocide against Native Americans and enslaved Africans over the next century. The only “life” they were referencing in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence was their own.

For thousands of years before those colonizers set foot on what would become the contiguous United States, people here and around the world used medicinal herbs and plants such as bear root and juniper to stop or prevent pregnancies. As Renee Bracey Sherman, my coauthor on the book Liberating Abortion, points out, the earth provided them with what they needed to control their reproduction. We found while conducting research for our book that people did not consider these terminations to be abortions as we think of them today, but rather a process for “restoring the menses.” The misogynistic argument that an embryo or fetus had a “right to life”—an idea that is not unlike the European colonists’ belief that they had a right to steal land that wasn’t theirs—was nonexistent.

But these abortion practices are also not as ancient as they may sound. In the 19th century, Indigenous people in what is now southern Montana used medicinal plants like calamus and horsetail to end undesirable pregnancies—for example, during brutal winters when it was too cumbersome to carry a pregnancy, or when the woman was ill. Enslaved Black women throughout the South notoriously chewed cotton-root bark to end or prevent pregnancies and experience some modicum of dignity in the atrocious system of chattel slavery and forced reproduction. Abortion has been a part of US history for as long as women have been.

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There are two founding fathers who seemed to understand this need—that abortion was essential to the exercise of our unalienable rights. Benjamin Franklin, the US Postal Service’s first leader, included an abortion recipe in The American Instructor, his 1748 reprint of a popular British textbook that offered guidance on basic tasks and subjects, including arithmetic and writing. In 1792, when Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Martha gave her cousin Nancy gum of guaiacum “to produce an abortion”—because Nancy had been impregnated by her sister’s husband—and had to testify in court about her involvement, Jefferson wrote in a letter to his daughter, “I see guilt but in one person, and not in her.” He added that his abortion-providing daughter was “on firm ground” and that he should “be made very happy if you are the instrument not only of supporting the spirits of your afflicted friend under the weight bearing on them, but of preserving her in the peace and love of her friends.”

That’s the thing about abortion: It is always necessary, whether it’s because the pregnant person needs one or because they want one. But care has never been guaranteed in America, not even under Roe v. Wade, despite being essential to a functioning democracy and gender equality.

The effort to control who could have or provide abortions began in earnest in the mid-1800s, when the American Medical........

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