Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor in chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

My guest today is Professor Leslie Regan. She is Professor

of History, Medicine, Gender, Women's Studies, and Law at the University of Illinois. She

has written the award-winning book When Abortion Was a Crime, as well as book dangerous pregnancies.

Thank you for joining us, Professor Regan.

Thank you.

It's good to be here.

The reason that I reached out to you and wanted to talk to you was I read an article in

The Economist, the Distinguished the British Current Events magazine, The Economist, the distinguished British current events magazine, The Economist,

an editorial called Abortion would be best governed by legislatures. And in that article,

it makes the case essentially that criminalized abortion is not that bad for women.

And it says, and it gives a supposed history lesson on the criminalization of abortion and says,

there is a quote here, there is no documented case in America of a woman being prosecuted for seeking an abortion since 1920.

There's only been one case of a woman being convicted of un seeking an abortion since 1922.

There's only been one case of a woman being convicted of unlawful self-management abortion,

and that was vacated on appeal.

That's the extent of its history lesson to tell us why it's not so bad to have criminalized abortion for women.

Women won't suffer. And as I read that and boiled with rage, I thought, I need to talk to

Professor Leslie Rican to have her explain a little bit of why this is such an egregiously

wrong misrepresentation of the history of how criminalized abortion affected women.

So perhaps we could begin with a bit of an overview of what it was like for women

under the regime of criminalized abortion that persisted until 1973.

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