Article ID: CBB277198782

Nursing and Hospital Abortions in the United States, 1967–1973 (2018)

unapi

Before elective abortion was legalized nationally in 1973 with the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, seventeen states and the District of Columbia liberalized their abortion statutes. While scholars have examined the history of physicians who had performed abortions before and after it was legal and of feminists’ work to expand the range of healthcare choices available to women, we know relatively little about nurses’ work with abortion. By focusing on the history of nursing in those states that liberalized their abortion laws before Roe, this article reveals how women who sought greater control over their lives by choosing abortion encountered medical professionals who were only just beginning to question the gendered conventions that framed labor roles in American hospitals. Nurses, whose workloads increased exponentially when abortion laws were liberalized, were rarely given sufficient training to care for abortion patients. Many nurses directed their frustrations to the women patients who sought the procedure. This essay considers how the expansion of women’s right to abortion prompted nurses to question the gendered conventions that had shaped their work experiences.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB277198782/

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Authors & Contributors
Reagan, Leslie J.
Moran, Rachel Louise
Kateřina Lišková
Sara Matthiesen
Heidt-Forsythe, Erin
Seitz, Emily A.
Concepts
Reproductive medicine
Medicine and gender
Abortion
Women and health
Medicine and politics
Medicine and law
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
United States
Canada
Buenos Aires (Argentina)
England
Czechoslovakia
London (England)
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