Abortion was not always illegal before Roe. Into the 19th century, what a woman did with her early pregnancy was considered a purely domestic matter. Until “quickening,” when the fetus was perceived to be alive and kicking, it wasn’t even considered a pregnancy, but a “blocking” or an “imbalance,” and women regularly “restored the menses,” if they so chose, through plants and potions. Abortifacients became commercially available by the mid-1700s.

Quality control was not great, and the earliest abortion legislation, in the 1820s and ’30s, appears to have been an effort to curtail poisoning rather than abortion itself.