Innovators and instigators: feminist contributions to American abortion technology, 1963-1973.

©FFPRHC J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2007: 33(3) Background As historian Susan Klepp has delineated, lay, femalecontrolled abortion technologies have been a part of the American fabric since the colonial era.1 Such technologies included herbal remedies, bleeding through venesection and leeching, vigorous exercise, bathing and douching. New methods were discovered by trial and error, and transmitted through kinship and friendship networks. However, by the late 19th century, the mainstream medical establishment, represented by the American Medical Association, succeeded in criminalising almost all forms of pregnancy termination. The only abortions that remained legal were those performed for ‘therapeutic’ reasons. In other words, abortions that physicians had determined were necessary to preserve maternal life. Moreover, therapeutic abortions could only be performed by a physician using the best that medical ‘science’ had to offer which, at the time, was the surgical technique of dilation and curettage (D&C). Thus, by legally eliminating the possibility of lay abortion, and by channelling abortion into the physician-controlled surgical realm, these practitioners eliminated the possibility that pregnancy termination technologies would be used by, or developed by, anyone but themselves. While physicians were able to usurp the power that women had over their own bodies by excluding lay healers from the realm of abortion technology, they ultimately did not succeed. Not only did 20th century women participate in the development of new reproductive technologies, but they also fought the legal battles that decriminalised abortion. During the decade prior to the legalisation of abortion (i.e. 1963–1973), feminists in particular served as ‘mothers of invention’: they were abortion innovators, and instigators, who rejected social and political attempts to stifle their ideas, ingenuity and commitment to other women. Three of these feminist networks – the Society for Humane Abortions, Jane and Carol Downer’s branch of the women’s health movement – were particularly significant because they successfully recuperated the cultural values of their colonial foremothers. Moreover, they reclaimed abortion technologies from the control of male physicians, and used them to resist, challenge and subvert the American medical and legal systems’ domination of women’s health care, reproduction and sexuality.