Erika Bachiochi writes on how to navigate a world after Roe v. Wade and nationwide abortion in light of the experience of the early women’s rights activists:

In 1869 the Revolution, the women’s rights newspaper founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published an editorial on the unusual actions of Dr. Charlotte Lozier. Dr. Lozier had caused the arrest of Andrew Moran, a man who had traveled from South Carolina to her medical office in New York City, seeking to procure from her an abortion for a young woman carrying his child. “The Dr. assured him that he had come to the wrong place for any such shameful, revolting, unnatural and unlawful purpose,” the editorial explained. Becoming angry, Moran grew abusive, and Dr. Lozier, twenty-two years old at the time, had him arrested. Excerpting from another newspaper, the Revolution reported, Lozier “insists that as the commission of a crime is not one of the functions of the medical profession, a person who asks a physician to commit the crime of ante-natal infanticide can no more be considered his patient than one who asks him to poison his wife.”

Moran had knocked on the wrong city door that day. Madame Restell, a well-known New York abortionist, would have happily obliged his request. Restell was at that time one of at least two hundred abortionists working in New York City alone, a New York Times article estimated in 1871. The Revolution editorial sought to “expose Restellism,” the term given Restell’s immensely profitable but unlawful line of work. Indeed, Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman licensed to practice medicine in the United States, lamented Restell’s reputation as a “female physician,” a description that, Blackwell later wrote in her autobiography, “exclusively applied at that time to those women who carried out her vile occupation.” Restell’s practice, according to Blackwell, was an “utter degradation of what might and should become a noble profession for women.” …

Like the doctors of the American Medical Association (AMA) who successfully lobbied in the mid-nineteenth century for the passage of statutes protective of unborn human beings – in an effort to enhance common law protections in light of contemporary advances in embryology – women’s rights advocates also regarded abortion as “the unwarrantable destruction of human life.” But these women were unconvinced that abortion prohibitions, on their own, would alter the circumstances that caused desperate women to abort. Matilda Gage, a leading women’s rights advocate, captured the sentiment well: “Much as I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder, I cannot believe … that such a law would have the desired effect. It seems to me to be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains. We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil, and destroy it.” …

In the post-Roe era, abortion-rights organizations will continue to fight state by state (and in Congress too), advocating abortion as the lynchpin of women’s freedom and equality. But note the fundamental reversal: the act that women’s rights advocates once considered evidence of women’s unequal status in society is championed as an essential component of women’s equal status today. The act that poor women were “forced to commit” is now the privileged response to female poverty in our day.

Today, pro-life activists should especially take heed of the early feminists’ advocacy for women harmed by punitive attitudes within the medical and legal establishment. No jurisdiction ever prosecuted women for their abortions, nor should they if Roe falls. …

The justice we need today would look to both protect and promote the health and well-being of unborn children and their mothers and ensure that all women, especially the poor, have the financial resources, medical support, and workplace accommodations they need to care for their children once they are born. Such care may in some instances include the courageous choice to place a child with an adoptive family. It should demand the father’s participation (which will mean securing good work for working-class men). In the best-case scenario, such affirmative measures would be included in the very bills that restrict abortion, so as not to render them optional or an afterthought.

Worth reading. The reversal of Roe will mark the end of one dark chapter and the start of a new chapter in American life.