abortion

"Induced termination of pregnancy, involving destruction of the embryo or fetus."

"1. Induced termination of a pregnancy with destruction of the fetus or embryo; therapeutic abortion. 2. Spontaneous abortion."

"The deliberate termination of a pregnancy, usually before the embryo or fetus is capable of independent life."

"The spontaneous or induced termination of pregnancy before the fetus reaches a viable age."

"Expulsion from the uterus an embryo or fetus prior to the stage of viability (20 weeks' gestation or fetal weight <500g). A distinction made between [abortion] and premature birth: premature infants are those born after the stage of viability but prior to 37 weeks."

"Abortion is the spontaneous or induced termination of pregnancy before fetal viability. Because popular use of the word abortion implies a deliberate pregnancy termination, some prefer the word miscarriage to refer to spontaneous fetal loss before viability [...] The National Center for Health Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the World Health Organization (WHO) define abortion as pregnancy termination prior to 20 weeks' gestation or a fetus born weighing less than 500 g. Despite this, definitions vary widely according to state laws."

"The mere fact that a certain class of decisions is difficult cannot justify the absence of consistent supporting standards. Each state must compare the language of its statutes to determine whether the definitions of the parameters of life conflict. If these definitions conflict, as is the case with Missouri's Definition of Death and abortion regulation statutes, the state must amend the existing language to bring into concert the criteria defining these parameters. Each state should decide whether to accomplish this goal by changing its statute in which death is defined or by changing any other statute with conflicting criteria."

"Sixteen years after the Supreme Court liberalized abortion policy, the United States continues to debate two competing and seemingly irreconcileable definitions of abortion. The experience of those who provide abortion has received relatively little research attention despite this unique set of historical circumstances. This paper presents findings from an exploratory study of 130 abortion workers (physicians, nurses and counselors). The data suggest that, despite formal beliefs about abortion rights, the situated experience of providing legal abortion evokes a range of abortion definitions. Seven central definition themes were cited repeatedly by the respondents: abortion as a woman's right, a destructive act, part of the practitioner's work, a technical procedure, a positive act, murder and an irresponsible act. Respondents perceived each definition to fit within one of three fixed and familiar perspectives: medical, pro-choice or pro-life. Each perspective was understood to have its own exclusive meanings, vocabulary and imagery which automatically remanded the situated definitions to a broader social context. Each definition of abortion was seen to define the event itself as well as to input specific meaning and differential value to what is aborted, the woman terminating her pregnancy, the nature of abortion work and the role of the practitioner. These definition components were perceived to be specific, codified and mutually exclusive within the different definition themes. They also were found to be linked to expected and specified feelings. The co-existence of feelings or definitions that were perceived as consistent was hardly noted by respondents."

"1. a. The expulsion or removal from the womb of a developing embryo or fetus, spec. (Med.) in the period before it is capable of independent survival, occurring as a result either of natural causes (more fully spontaneous abortion) or of a deliberate act (more fully induced abortion); the early or premature termination of pregnancy with loss of the fetus; an instance of this."

"[A] spontaneous or deliberate ending of pregnancy before the fetus can be expected to survive."

"[T]he termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus."

"[T]he termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus: as (a) spontaneous expulsion of a human fetus during the first 12 weeks of gestation (b) induced expulsion of a human fetus (c) expulsion of a fetus by a domestic animal often due to infection at any time before completion of pregnancy."

"a medical operation to end a pregnancy so that the baby is not born alive."

"An abortion refers to the termination of a pregnancy. It can be induced (see Definitions, Terminology, and Reference Resources) through a pharmacological or a surgical procedure, or it may be spontaneous (also called miscarriage)." "Definitions of abortion vary across and within countries as well as among different institutions. Language used to refer to abortion often also reflects societal and political opinions and not only scientific knowledge (Grimes and Gretchen 2010). Popular use of the word abortion implies a deliberate pregnancy termination, whereas a miscarriage is used to refer to spontaneous fetal loss when the fetus is not viable (i.e., not yet unable to survive independently outside the womb)."

"Termination of a pregnancy, whether spontaneous or induced."

"Termination of pregnancy before 20 weeks' gestation calculated from date of onset of last menses. An alternative definition is delivery of a fetus with a weight of less than 500 g. If abortion occurs before 12 weeks' gestation, it is called early; from 12 to 20 weeks it is called late."

"The contentious issue of abortion is riddled with jabberwocky terminology that is contradictory, obsolete, ambiguous and misleading. Both the lay and professional literature uses obstetrical terms improperly, including abortion. Recent press coverage of Dr. George Tiller's murder has added to this confusion, with misleading language such as late-term abortion."

"1. An artificially induced termination of a pregnancy for the purpose of destroying an embryo or fetus. 2. The spontaneous expulsion of an embryo or fetus before viability;"

"Abortion is the intentional removal of a fetus or an embryo from a mother's womb for purposes other than that of either producing a live birth or disposing of a dead embryo."

"[T]he expulsion of a fetus from the uterus before it has reached the stage of viability (in human beings, usually about the 20th week of gestation)."

"[P]remature expulsion from the uterus of the products of conception, either the embryo or a nonviable fetus."

"A term that, in philosophy, theology, and social debates, often means the deliberate termination of pregnancy before the fetus is able to survive outside the uterus. However, participants in these debates sometimes use the term abortion simply to mean the termination of pregnancy before birth, regardless of whether the fetus is viable or not."

"[A] situation where a fetus leaves the uterus before it is fully developed, especially during the first 28 weeks of pregnancy, or a procedure which causes this to happen...[T]o have an abortion to have an operation to make a fetus leave the uterus during the first period of pregnancy."

"[T]he removal of an embryo or fetus from the uterus in order to end a pregnancy" or "[A]ny of various surgical methods for terminating a pregnancy, especially during the first six months."

"[I]n the absence of accurate dating criteria, fetuses weighing <500 g are usually not considered births, but rather are termed abortuses for purposes of vital statistics."[12]"

"[a] fetus or embryo removed or expelled from the uterus during the first half of gestation—20 weeks or less, or in the absence of accurate dating criteria, born weighing < 500 g.""

""[A]n operation or other procedure to terminate pregnancy before the fetus is viable" or "[T]he premature termination of pregnancy by spontaneous or induced expulsion of a nonviable fetus from the uterus"."

"The termination of pregnancy or premature expulsion of the products of conception by any means, usually before fetal viability."

"1. medicine the removal of an embryo or fetus from the uterus before it is sufficiently developed to survive independently, deliberately induced by the use of drugs or by surgical procedures. Also called termination or induced abortion. 2. medicine the spontaneous expulsion of an embryo or fetus from the uterus before it is sufficiently developed to survive independently. Also called miscarriage, spontaneous abortion.""

"The definition of abortion is crucial to the efforts of the all-party Oireachtas committee, when it comes to make its recommendations, Dr Alistair McFar lane, a retired obstetrician and gynaecologist, told the hearing. No definition appeared in the Green Paper, he said, and the committee had heard a number of accounts from the various medical experts in the past week which differed as to whether or not the ending of pregnancy in certain procedures (carried out by all obstetricians on medical grounds) amounted to abortion."

"Interruption of pregnancy before the fetus has attained a stage of viability, usually before the 24th gestational week."

"[T]he Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists recently came out with its own glossary of terms, suggesting, for example, that people don't say abortion at all, and instead say "intentional feticide." The organization says the word abortion "is a vague term with a multitude of definitions depending on the context in which it is being used.""

"Mifepristone may be the least marketed pharmaceutical product in the U.S. There aren’t any ads for it on TV. Most doctors can’t prescribe it. Pharmacists don’t know much about it, since it doesn’t sit on the shelves at CVS or Walgreens. It would be reasonable to assume this is all because mifepristone is exceptionally dangerous. But it sends fewer people to the ER than Tylenol or Viagra."

"Black women have been aborting themselves since the earliest days of slavery. Many slave women refusing to bring children into a world of interminable forced labor, where chains and floggings and sexual abuse for women were the everyday conditions of life. A doctor practicing in Georgia around the middle of the last century noticed that abortions and miscarriages were far more common among his slave patients than among the white women he treated. Why were self-imposed abortions and reluctant acts of infanticide such common occurrence during slavery? Not because Black women had discovered solutions to their predicament, but rather because they were desperate. Abortions and infanticides were acts of desperation, motivated not by the biological birth process but by the oppressive conditions of slavery. Most of these women, no doubt, would have expressed their deepest resentment had someone hailed their abortions as a stepping stone toward freedom."

"Many slave owners looked at black women’s bodies as a source of free labor and often forced relationships or raped enslaved women to produce more children. Generally, enslaved women who bore children were considered more valuable than those who didn’t. At the same time, the backbreaking work expected of the women, the lack of medical care and healthy food, and abusive treatment often resulted in miscarriages, premature births, and stillbirths. Those losses led some southern whites to conclude that enslaved women knew secret ways to manage their fertility. Though the practice probably wasn’t as common as was assumed, some black women did use remedies such as cotton root or looked to a black midwife to end their pregnancies. In doing so, they were asserting some control over their own bodies-and perhaps hoping to avoid the heartbreak of having a child born into slavery or sold away from the family. But the birth rate for black women didn’t notably decline until after the end of the Civil War."

"Margaret Garner, who was born as an enslaved girl, almost certainly did not plan to kill her child when she grew up and became an enslaved mother. But she also couldn’t yet know that the physical, emotional and psychological violence of slavery, relentless and horrific, would one day conspire to force her maternal judgment in a moment already fraught with grave imperative."

"Herbal remedies to induce miscarriage were equally well known to enslaved women. Slaves often grew herbs and mixed their own medicine, derisively referred to as “negro remedies” by Southern whites. A common concern among slave-owners (who, as I mentioned in my last post, stood to gain from their slaves’ pregnancies) was that slave women were using cotton root as an abortifacient. Historian Sharla Fett writes that white doctors worried that enslaved women were using those old emmenagogues pennyroyal, tansy and rue to end pregnancies. Just as with white women, doctors were eager to control the use of slaves’ herbal remedies, particularly those used to regulate menstruation."

"Legend has popularized the image of the Caribbean as a woman compelled to suckle a snake all night long. This image of a woman’s violated body is viewed as paradigmatic of a land and people exploited and ravaged by imperialist aggression. As a corporeal representation, the image recalls Hortense Spillers’s formulation of the New World as a “scene of “actual” mutilation, dismemberment and exile,” where the “seared divided, ripped-apartness” of the flesh serves as “primary narrative.” As legend has encoded it, however, this primary narrative is inscribed in the flesh of the woman’s body and takes the particular form of violated maternity This powerful image of the violated maternal figure has, not surprisingly, found a significant place in contemporary Caribbean and African American literature. The literary representation of the figure of the violated mother is enmeshed with two dominant and long-standing issues of this literature. Although they have long been of concern in Caribbean and African American literature, the slave mother and black motherhood have only recently appeared, in all their complexity, as focal points for the exploration of past history and self-expression. Not only does the issue of violated maternity force the painfully unspeakable and unspoken experience into avenues of objectification, insisting that the sexual abuse of black women, both slave and free, be included in discussion of slavery, but, as image, it can also become emblematic or representative of an entire people, as in the work of Edouard Glissant. As well, it can become the cornerstone for a critique of repressed desire, as in Maryse Conde’s “Moi, Tituba, sorciere . . . Noire de Sale” (1986; Eng. “I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem”). This critique resolves itself, turning absence into presence, through an alternative production/reproduction: that of writing or telling the female self into existence."

"Throughout Antillean oral culture,” writes Maryse Conde in “La parole des femmes” (Women’s Word; 1979), “the mother is glorified as the bearer of gifts and the dispenser of goods. We can easily say that this is also the case in literature written by both men and women.” This idealization of the mother, which Conde characterizes as an enduring feature of the folklore and literature of the Antilles, has given rise to a romanticized, if not exotic, portrayal of maternity. It is only recently, argues Conde, that feminist literature of the Antilles has responded to the model image of a nurturing, supportive, selfless mother and the reductionist conception of maternity as the definitive function of women. The response, Conde adds, is somewhat nuanced: although literary heroines continue to conceptualize the mother as a prominent figure, they themselves refuse maternity. Conde suggests that the ambivalence that accompanies the heroine’s refusal reflects both the persistent defining power of the images and a conscious or unconscious rejection of them (40-47). I would like to suggest that, in addition, the ambivalence is indicative of residual traces of violence against the slave mother, vestiges of the past that consciously or unconsciously shape present conceptions of social identity. Rooted in the violence colonization of black female sexuality, motherhood in slavery was an extremely complex and conflict-ridden experience, the repercussions of which are still felt today and manifest themselves as the literary heroine’s ambivalence."

"It is clear to see how deeply abortion bans are rooted in white supremacy and patriarchal strongholds when we look at the history of Black women in this country. The tradition of disregarding the humanity of Black people is part of more than 400 years of white supremacist systems in America. Although abortion was legal throughout the country until after the Civil War, there were different rules for enslaved Black women than for white women. Enslaved Black women were valuable property. They didn’t have the freedom to control their bodies, and slave owners prohibited them from having abortions. Under the law, white men owned Black women’s bodies. So, enslaved women who had access to emmenagogic herbs — plants used to stimulate menstruation — had to make remedies to induce their own abortions in secret. When slavery was abolished in 1865, the societal control over Black women’s bodies remained. Today, our white supremacist culture judges Black women for both having children and for having abortions — besetting them with blame for virtually any decision they make and any form of agency they take about their bodies."

"Southern slaves were "the happiest, and, in some sense the freest people in the world," wrote George Fitzhugh, Virginia proslavery defender. He claimed bondwomen did "little hard work" and were "protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters." In her famous diary, Mary Chesnut noted that the female slaves "take life easily. Marrying is the amusement of their life." Many antebellum southerners thought the female slaves were sensuous and promiscuous and cited the "easy chastity" of the bondwomen. Since associations were made between promiscuity and reproduction, the desired increase of the slave population seemed to be evidence of the bondwoman's passion. A slaveowner in northern Mississippi told Fredrick Law Olmsted that slaves "breed faster than white folks, a 'mazin' sight, you know; they begin younger," and, he added, "they don't very often wait to be married." Bondwomen's perception of the slave experience is in marked contrast to the slaveowners'. In her remarkable autobiography, Linda Brent, a mulatto female slave, noted, "Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own." Female bondage was worse than male bondage because the female slave was both a woman and a slave in a patriarchial regime where males and females were unequal, whether white or black. Because they were slaves, African-American women were affected by the rule of the patriarch in more ways and to a greater degree than the white women in the Big House. The size of the food allotment, brutal whippings, slave sales, and numerous other variables influenced the bondwoman's view of the patriarchy. Yet because she was a woman, her view, like that of the white woman, was also gender related. According to Anne Firor Scott, the most widespread source of discontent among white women centered around their inability "to control their own fertility." On the other hand, the bondwoman's entire sex life was subject to the desires of her owner. This essay will, therefore, deal only with the bondwomen's perspective from the viewpoint of gender, using twentieth-century interviews with female ex-slaves who were at least twelve or thirteen years of age at the time of emancipation. Of the 514 women in this category, 205, or almost forty percent, made comments of this nature."

"Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave of free. Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother-“Partus Sequitur Ventrem”. And that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act."

"Claudia Tate has observed that for female slaves "motherhood was an institution to which they had only biological claim". Enslaved women and their children could be separated at any time, and even if they belonged to the same owner, strict labor policies and plantation regulations severely limited the development of their relationships. Hortense J. Spillers concludes that because of this fundamental maternal outrage, and the concomitant banishment of the black father, "only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender". George Cunningham further argues, "Within the domain of slavery, gender or culturally derived notions of man- and womanhood do not exist". The predetermined violence of slavery disrupts conventional meanings attached to words such as "mother" and "womanhood." What is motherhood for a woman deprived of the ability to care for and protect her child? How are we to conceptualize maternal identity under conditions of enslavement? Furthermore, because procreation by bondwomen can be regarded as both a means of perpetuating slavery and an act of love and self-sacrifice, the sexuality of enslaved women and their relationship to their offspring must be understood as a complex negotiation involving individual agency, resistance, and power. Due to slavery's basic destabilization of blood relations, the black female subject demands new terms of radical self-determination. Spillers thus reminds her readers, "It is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject"."

"It is precisely through her flesh as both mother and slave woman that Harriet A. Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) claims the insurgent ground of her social identity and formulates her resistance to human bondage. By emphasizing her narrator's maternal sentiments, Jacobs resists prevailing beliefs concerning black women's indifference to their children while also establishing an important association between her protagonist Linda Brent and domestic ideologies. Much like Harriet Beecher Stowe and other nineteenth-century writers of sentimental fiction, Jacobs describes "nurture as a quintessence of the maternal that crosses race and class boundaries" (Stephanie Smith 215). Relying upon an understanding of maternity as a form of innate attachment, Jacobs presents Linda's actions as largely determined by the effect they will have on her children and their eventual emancipation. Many female slaves were unable to keep their families together, yet by emphasizing the oppositional action inspired by maternal sentiment Jacobs presents motherhood as a force that resists slavery and its supporters. By fashioning a literary persona who is defined almost exclusively by her maternal identity, Jacobs rejects the materialist logic of human ownership. Maternal love is shown to offer a model of relations that opposes the economy of exchange and possession characterizing the antebellum system of human bondage. Converting her body and reproductive abilities from sites of exploitation to vehicles of resistance, Linda undermines the authority of the slave master and works to liberate her children. Works by Carla Peterson, Valerie Smith, and Claudia Tate have focused upon Jacobs's departure from the assumptions and expectations of the male slave narrative to articulate the experiences and concerns of bondwomen. By contrast, I explore forms of female bodily resistance as well as ideological strategies of literary representation. Rather than conflate Jacobs with the text's protagonist, as many previous critics have done, I analyze Linda as a literary figure deliberately constructed to perform certain political aims. As the embodiment of maternal love, she acts almost exclusively to improve the lives of her children. Although Linda strains credibility as a result of her overriding maternal sensibility, Jacobs's reliance upon the trope of motherhood capitalizes on the political import of prevailing beliefs in the sanctity and power of the mother and suggests that a woman's sexuality offers a vital means of resistance against patriarchal oppression."

"From the moment of its introduction into the Atlantic world, hereditary racial slavery depended on an understanding that enslaved women's reproductive lives would be tethered to the institution of slavery. At the same time, few colonial slave codes explicitly defined the status of these children. This essay explores English slave codes regarding reproduction under slavery alongside the experience of reproduction to suggest that legislative silences are not the final word on race and reproduction. The presumption that their children would also be enslaved produced a visceral understanding of early modern racial formations for enslaved women. Using a seventeenth-century Virginia slave code as its anchor, this essay explores the explicit and implicit consequences of slaveowners' efforts to control enslaved women's reproductive lives."

"Atlantic slavery rested upon a notion of heritability. It thus relied on a reproductive logic that was inseparable from the explanatory power of race. As a result, women and their experienced of enslavement shed critical light on what it meant to be enslaved or free in the early modern Atlantic world. Regardless of the rate of reproduction among the enslaved-which remained low in all early American slave societies-the ideological solidity of those slave societies needed reproducing women. Building a system of racial slavery on the notion of heritability did not require the presence of natural population growth among the enslaved, but it did require a clear understanding that enslaved women gave birth to enslaved children. Resituating heritability was key in the practice of an enslavement that systematically alienated the enslaved from their kind and their lineage. Enslaved people had to be understood as dispossessed, outside of the normal networks of family and community, to justify the practice of mass enslavement."

"The practices of abortion and infanticide seem worthy of at least a fleeting mention in most studies of slave women in the United States, yet few historians mention the use of contraception. Those who do, usually conclude that little is known about the subject, but that it is probably not particularly significant. This article will discuss the use of contraception among slaves and will concentrate, in particular, on the use of cotton roots as a form of birth-control. Evidence that the cotton root was used for this purpose is taken mainly from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives, edited by George Rawick. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Vols. 2–41 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972–1979). As yet, the author has come across only a few references to the use of cotton roots as a form of contraception in any other source. The WPA narratives are a controversial source, but, in sifting through every single interview, the multiple references to such an intimate practice were striking and demanded attention. This article forms part of a chapter from a thesis which looks at the work of slave women in the American South. Liese M. Perrin, “Slave Women and Work in the American South” (University of Birmingham: Ph.D. diss., 1999). A thorough reading of the WPA narratives reveals not only that slave women used contraception, but also that it may have been very effective. In the context of slave women and work, this is a significant discovery, as the evidence, which is detailed below, suggests that slave women not only understood that their childbearing capacity was seen in terms of producing extra capital, but that they were sufficiently opposed to this function to actually avoid conception. The use of contraception can be seen not only as a form of resistance, but also, more specifically, as a form of strike, since reproduction was an important work role for most slave women."

"It is clear to see how deeply abortion bans are rooted in white supremacy and patriarchal strongholds when we look at the history of Black women in this country. The tradition of disregarding the humanity of Black people is part of more than 400 years of white supremacist systems in America. Although abortion was legal throughout the country until after the Civil War, there were different rules for enslaved Black women than for white women. Enslaved Black women were valuable property. They didn’t have the freedom to control their bodies, and slave owners prohibited them from having abortions. Under the law, white men owned Black women’s bodies. So, enslaved women who had access to emmenagogic herbs — plants used to stimulate menstruation — had to make remedies to induce their own abortions in secret."

"This article examines antislavery authors’ attempts in the 1850s to fictionalize the Margaret Garner story of slave infanticide as a means of converting northern white readers to the antislavery cause. In their attempts to gain sympathy for an enslaved female protagonist who had murdered her own child, these authors confronted strong cultural beliefs about femininity, motherhood, and blackness. Almost uniformly, their strategy involved lightening the skin of the main character and presenting the killing of her child as a form of suicide. Nevertheless, the intense emotions surrounding the slavery issue by the mid‐1850s also led these authors to endow their fictional slave women with an aggressiveness that challenged contemporary social boundaries for women."

"If you don't allow abortions, it's not abortions you are abolishing; it is safe abortions you are abolishing."