Abortion in Iowa in the nineteenth century

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, increasing but unknown numbers of women pursued abortions in Iowa. In response to rising abortion rates in the state and around the nation, the Iowa legislature explicitly prohibited abortion beginning in the territorial period. Rather than a system of “benign neglect,” where Iowa officials tacitly accepted abortion while legally disapproving of it, newspapers and legal documents reveal that a mixture of legal, civil, and social pressure suppressed the provision of abortion. Iowa’s story includes the stories of pregnant women, illegal abortions, and social conflict. The social and political forces of the nineteenth century prepared the state for renewed conflict around abortion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.