Abraham Lincoln asked a New York judge to write a legal code abolishing slavery in Arizona. But tucked into the Howell Code was an abortion ban that Arizona’s Supreme Court just upheld.
One hundred and sixty years ago, after Union forces had wrested control of the American Southwest from Confederate troops, President Abraham Lincoln appointed a New York judge to write the legal code of the newly formed territory of Arizona.
The new territory needed new laws. Lincoln named Howell, a New Yorker who held several legal and political roles in Michigan, as a judge. Howell was considered relatively progressive for his time, having worked to abolish capital punishment, among other causes, said Kevin Waite, an associate professor of American History at Durham University in the United Kingdom.
The inclusion of the clause was a sign of how attitudes toward abortion in the United States were growing more restrictive at the time, a precursor to the Victorian-era “moral panic” around women’s sexuality, he added. “Fetuses were not recognized as human lives, but rather a ‘blockage’ until quickening, or when a women first felt the fetus move, generally in the fourth or fifth month,” she wrote. “After this point, abortion would be taboo. What women did before this point was considered strictly the purview of women.”
This, said Waite, was in line with the abortion debate at the time, which was often “more concerned with the health of the mother” than with making “a moral judgment about the propriety of abortion.”
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