Mail-order dispensing of the prescription drug mifepristone has become the latest flashpoint in this country’s long-running debate over abortion access. It also has brought back from the dead one of the oldest federal statutes to address that contentious subject. In their fight to limit access to a drug approved
Examining Georgia’s 1876 abortion law through the lens of history, law, and morality—linking it to Reconstruction-era racial politics, shifting medical norms, and constitutional change. Abortion became a tool to control labor, gender roles, and moral narratives in post-Civil War Georgia.
In the throes of “Radical Reconstruction,” the population of Georgia remained sharply divided along racial and political lines. Three long years passed between emancipation and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, during which time the status of the state’s Black population remained uncertain. They were no longer enslaved but
