When Abortion Was a Crime

This is the definitive account of what abortion looked like for the one hundred years during which it was almost completely illegal in the United States.

Reagan does an excellent job of showing us the different ways that women nevertheless accessed abortion care during that time, even as she points out how access was always shaped by race and class.

She is also great at demonstrating how and why police and lawmakers cracked down on abortion and made it less accessible at particular moments in this one-hundred-year period, ultimately showing why it was eventually decriminalized in 1973. 

Until I read this book, I thought I’d have to wait forever before someone exploded the myth of the back alley abortion.

As Leslie J. Reagan proves in her mind-blowing account of the period when abortion was criminalized throughout the US, an era that, sadly, has restarted with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, criminalization drove abortion underground, but not the way most modern-day Americans imagine it.

Skillfully marshaling her evidence from ads, press accounts, and medical journals, Reagan recreates an era when everyone was engaging in crime or knew someone who was, but no one would talk openly about it.… show more.