When it was illegal in America, what was the punishment for having an abortion?

Question

When it was illegal in America, what was the punishment for having an abortion?

Answer 1

The doctor's license to practice medicine would be revoked.  

It depended on the state.

Answer 2

I am a CCMA

Besides the fines that the doctors incurred usually the punishment for the person that had the abortion was sterility or death from complications

Answer 3

Not sure; It should remain legal though. We need to leave the consequences of that to the woman who goes through it and God. Would you rather have a kid born, to grow up unwanted or in the foster system? What if they go through mental and physical abuse and found dead from malnutrition and dehydration? I also don't understand why pro lifers aren't knocking down the doors to orphanages adopting kids that have been given up because they weren't aborted.

Answer 4

I would be surprised if a woman was ever prosecuted under this law -- probably "providers" of the service, who were often untrained old women.

Answer 5

Mostly fines.  The people who performed abortions got jail time.

Answer 6

Probably 25 years

Answer 7

From a 1967 Time article:

The central problem of abortion in the U. S. is that it is governed by criminal law rather than medical knowledge. Following English common law, the early U. S. regarded abortion as no crime before the fetus quickens in the womb (about five months); a miscarriage before 20 weeks still generally requires no death certificate or interment. But starting in 1860, many states outlawed abortion before as well as after quickening. New Hampshire, for example, bans hospital abortion before quickening, even to save a dying woman. The legal maze is extraordinary. In 17 states, unjustified abortion is a felony that carries sentences ranging up to 21 years. In some states, the woman herself can be charged for cooperating in the abortion.

Doctors in most states can never forget that the sole defense is proven necessity to save the patient's life. Only seven states even consider her health or safety. Actually, most hospital abortions are performed for admittedly illegal reasons, notably mental illness and German measles (25% of the 1964 total). Unfortunately, fear of the consequences creates vast inequities. To fend off prosecution, special hospital boards often use quotas and render questionable moral judgments.

The inescapable result is that women able to pay fees of $300 to $600 frantically seek illegal abortionists, who seem remarkably available (one middle-class East Coast wife asked five friends, got five names). Florida currently has an influx of skilled Cuban refugee doctors who once made Havana an abortion mecca and are now doing the same for Miami, where some 30 abortion mills last year paid off assorted officials and took in an estimated $20 million. But all too many U.S. abortionists are dangerous defrocked doctors—alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual perverts—or worse, bungling amateurs who don't hesitate to finish a sloppy job by tossing clients off tenement roofs or dismembering those who die. Equally sobering are the slum women who cannot afford even amateurs and do it themselves with hatpins, coat hangers and putrid soap solutions, which are often followed by lethal infection. Most desolate of all, perhaps, are those who cannot and dare not abort. Among the poor, who still know little about contraceptives, one result is ever more unwanted children, the key carriers of delinquency, divorce and crime. In 20 years, illegitimate births in the U.S. have more than doubled, to 291,000 a year, rising to 26% of all nonwhite births, compared with 3.6% of whites.

Answer 8

it was never illegal

some one refused to do one or something and it openede a huge case in the supreme court call roe or woe v. wade

Answer 9

I think the doctors that got caught or were turned in for performing them got into more trouble.  Fines, threats of license revocation etc.  

Answer 10

there was never any pnishment for the women who had the abortions, just the people giving them