This week on the Lectures and History podcast, a discussion on the history of abortion legislation.

La Sierra University professor Alicia Gutierrez-Romine speaks about laws and policies regarding the procedure.

Beginning in the 19th century, she tracks changes in medical practice and public opinion

through court cases and newspaper coverage. She also describes procedure restrictions,

access to illegal abortions, costs, and health risks in different time periods.

All right, everyone, welcome back. This week, we're looking at the topic of abortion. And in class on Tuesday, we watched the film Abortion Stories Women's Hell, and that was looking at some of the more current debates about abortion now. It was looking at abortion in states that had begun to legislate abortion restriction. So today we're actually going to go back in time a little bit.

We're going to give some historical context.

We're going to do a historical overview of the topic of abortion.

We're going to start nationally, and then we're going to look at California specifically,

specifically on the topics of specialized abortion or abortion

specialist and decriminalization.

And then we're going to go back to the national context to look at Roe v. Wade and then some

of the legislation that has happened since then and in some of the more recent years.

So if you recall from around week one or two, we did have a very brief introduction

to the topic of abortion in the colonial period. We talked about Sarah Grosvenner and her abortion

in the 1740s. So we had a very brief introduction to it, but today we're actually going to pick up around

the time of the Comstock Act.

So does everyone remember the Comstock Act from a couple weeks ago?

Can someone remind us what the Comstock Act is?

Yeah, Andrea.

I have no advertising any type of sexual contraceptives for information on plant parenthood or anything like that one?

Yeah, so no advertising of contraceptives and especially the dissemination of this stuff in the mail.

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