Challenging the Misuse of Women’s Legal History to Support Anti-Abortion Regulation

It looks like it is time again to reup this article I wrote over a decade ago disputing the use of women’s legal history to claim that nineteenth-century feminist pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton advocated against abortion. Tracy Thomas, Misappropriating Women's History in the Law & Politics of Abortion, 36 Seattle L. Rev. 1 (2012). I also discuss the issue further in my book, Tracy Thomas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton & the Feminist Foundations of Family Law (NYU Press 2016). Post-Dobbs, anti-choice writers have once again resurrected the erroneous claim that Stanton, and other historical feminists like Victoria Woodhull, actively opposed abortion. Erika Bachiochi & Rachel Morrison, Dobbs, Equality and the Contested Meaning of Women's Rights (Texas Review of Law & Politics, forthcoming).

My conclusion as to Stanton was to the contrary. I found that a close look at the historical record shows that Stanton supported—not opposed—women’s right to engage in voluntary, enlightened motherhood by choice. And she opposed state regulation of women’s private decisions and autonomy. Stanton actually said very little about abortion at all, a handful of comments over fifty years, in contrast to her thousands of speeches, writings, and interviews advocating many other demands for women’s rights for social, political, family, and economic citizenship. Instead, Stanton merely used the public debate swirling around abortion triggered by the new criminalization of abortion in the late 1860s as an avenue to voice her other demands for women’s equality, enfranchisement, autonomy, and opportunity.