![]() The laws were most often used in cases in which the women died, like a case from the early 1900s near Fort Worth. Storer and the American Medical Association pushed states to tighten their abortion laws, citing concerns over “unborn life” and women shirking their responsibilities as wives and mothers, said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian focusing on abortion at Florida State University College of Law. Texas’ efforts to regulate both childbirth and abortion coincided with a national effort started by a Boston doctor named Horatio Storer. This is part of why state laws regulating abortion often had an exception to save the life of the pregnant patient - as determined by a doctor. Midwives were also the keepers of knowledge about how to terminate a pregnancy. “Doctors come in in the 1850s with forceps and anesthesia promising an easier birth, but there’s no regulations.” “But these are health care providers who have a ton of knowledge and deep experience, and they tend to have better outcomes in terms of obstetrics than doctors,” Kluchin said. Nationally, doctors started a campaign against midwives, Kluchin said, painting them as dirty, uneducated and dangerous to pregnant women. “So doctors are trying to push in on midwives, in terms of childbirth, but midwives also tended to be the healers in their communities.” “But women were having babies every two years,” Kluchin said. Doctors were generally paid by the case, and since they weren’t particularly well-respected, they weren’t called on that often. They also wanted to start making real money. The nascent group wanted to institute educational requirements and standards of care to root out “quack” doctors. And with the Civil War looming, according to a history of the Texas Medical Association, “practically all Texas physicians were loyal to the Confederacy.” They were all men Texas would not admit the first “lady applicant” until 1887. Thirty-five of those trained physicians - referred to as the “regulars” - attended that first meeting in Austin in 1852 and, by the next year, succeeded in getting the Legislature to authorize the creation of the Medical Association of Texas. The Capitol building in Austin from 1856 until it burned in 1881. Texas had no medical schools, although several prominent Texans were educated in other states before returning home. Any man - with any level of education or experience - could call himself a doctor and charge for medical remedies of varying usefulness. In 1852, a group of physicians placed an ad in the Texas State Gazette calling a meeting of all those “desirous of promoting the advancement and improvement, as well as elevating the standard of our profession within this State.”Īt the time, the medical profession in the United States was almost entirely unregulated. It was codified at a moment when the medical establishment in Texas was starting to take shape and assert itself politically. The law exempted abortions performed “by medical advice” to save the life of the pregnant patient. ![]() Texas’ abortion statute, filed in the state’s first penal code under “offences against the persons or individuals,” came with two to five years of prison time for performing or furnishing the means for an abortion. In the absence of pregnancy tests or advanced understanding of menstrual cycles, how these practices aligned with the abortion law wasn’t always clear-cut.Ĭover page of the sixth Texas Legislature’s penal code, adopted in 1857. “And the abortion question really brings into stark relief that moment of turmoil of Texas and its position vis a vis the United States.”ĭespite the longstanding legal restrictions on abortion, Texans still found ways to control their reproductive destinies, historians say. “Texas is special … because it experiences so many different legal systems in a matter of decades,” Murillo said. For its decade of existence, the Republic of Texas “just continued on with that,” said Lina-Maria Murillo, a historian at the University of Iowa who has studied abortion laws in Texas and Mexico. British common law, which governed the early United States, allowed abortion up to “quickening” or the point 15 to 20 weeks into pregnancy when a fetus can first be felt moving in the womb.īut Texas originated as a Spanish colony and then became part of independent Mexico, both of which prohibited abortion.
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