The Abortion Bans are the Story of Democratic Backsliding

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. — Abraham Lincoln, 1838

In March 1916, Carolina Petrovitis, a mother of two small children, was in terrible pain following an illegal abortion when a local doctor sent her to the hospital. Three police officers soon arrived to question Carolina. With the permission of the hospital physician, hospitals being then required to cooperate in abortion investigations, Sgt. William E. O’Connor “instructed” an intern to “tell her she is going to die.” With the dying mother wailing from this cold-hearted invocation of her mortality, the police then collected a “dying declaration” from her in which she named the midwife who performed her abortion and gave facts pertinent to charging the midwife with a crime. The midwife was dragged in and Carolina identified her. A third police officer drew up another dying statement “covering the facts.” As he read the third statement back to Carolina, she lay in bed “in pain, vomiting;” illiterate, she made her “mark” on the statement. Having accomplished the state’s goals, she then died.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past, wrote Faulkner. In the abortion storm now gathering, Faulkner’s maxim has proven sadly accurate. Despite a century of ostensible progress, the aspirations of the legal regime which killed Carolina Petrovitis- criminalization of abortion and focus on prosecution at the expense of women’s…