The label that turns healthcare workers into criminals.

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A deceptive marketing campaign has been going on for over a century. And it's turned health care providers into criminals.

Until the late 1800s, abortion and reproductive health were primarily handled by women—midwives, many of whom were Black, Indigenous, or immigrants. As medicine professionalized, male doctors viewed this skilled group as threatening their business. Birth, they argued, ought to take place in a hospital. “The midwife is a relic of barbarism,” Dr. Joseph DeLee, a prominent 20th-century obstetrician, proclaimed, “a drag on the progress of the science and art of obstetrics.”

The restructuring of gynecological medicine went hand in hand with a budding movement to criminalize abortion. In 1860, governors of every state received a letter from the president of a young organization, the American Medical Association. Ghostwritten by Horatio Storer, a Harvard-educated surgeon, the letter was part of an AMA campaign touting a new idea: Abortion should be illegal because life begins at conception—not, as previous laws considered, at “quickening,” when fetal movements are first detected. Under this logic, as Storer made it his mission to convince the masses, practically all abortions should be a crime.

A vital part of the propaganda was to insist most abortions could not be health care.

His argument prevailed. During the late 1800s, statehouses wrote new legislation banning abortion, police stations filled with local practitioners offering the procedure, and newsrooms took up the cause, relegating reproductive care to the crime blotter.

More than a century later, we’re once again in an era of reproductive criminalization, and “abortionist” has reemerged in prominent places. In an April 2023 ruling that stayed the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk mentions the term 11 times. Last year, Fox News called doctors “late-term abortionist[s].”

A moniker that supposedly condemns violence is being used once more to condone it.

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