Ezra Klein talks to an abortion historian to put S.B. 8 into perspective.
By Annie Galvin Associate Producer, Opinion Audio |
Though it was not always referred to by this name, abortion, as a human practice, dates back at least as far as ancient Greece and Rome. When the Founders were drafting the Constitution, it was legal to terminate pregnancies before "quickening," or the moment when a woman could feel a life moving inside her body. |
But even as abortion became a crime in some U.S. states beginning in the 1820s, abortions did not stop. What history shows us is that abortion bans do not eliminate abortions, and criminalizing abortion makes the procedure less safe. |
Fast forward to Sept. 1, 2021, when Texas's law, known as Senate Bill 8, went into effect, effectively banning abortions six weeks after a pregnant person's last menstrual cycle and incentivizing citizens to enforce it. (Some have described that method as "vigilante justice.") |
"It is a brutal kind of law," the historian Leslie Reagan says on today's episode of "The Ezra Klein Show," "to think that we can force people to carry pregnancies to term and deliver, regardless of their own health, their bodies, their views, their needs." |
There's also a larger question, which today's episode explores: What does this law say about how a state like Texas views pregnant people — their health, their ability to make decisions and their very sense of self? |
Reflecting on his own family's experience with difficult pregnancies, Ezra says, "What the state is saying about the citizenship and worth of someone who is pregnant is chilling here: that they just have functionally no worth." |
History has come back to haunt our present, as the possibility of a post-Roe America looms. No matter one's views on the morality of abortion, there is much to learn from the persistence of this practice across time. Knowing this history can prepare us for what might come next. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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