History of Abortion Laws Abortions have been happening for a long time. Pretty much as long as people realized they’d rather have sex more often than they want to be pregnant. For a lot of history, abortions were legal until the woman felt the fetus moving, known as “quickening” or “ensoulment.” After the quickening, it was illegal to perform an abortion. These were the laws that governed the United States until the 1800s. In the 1820s, Connecticut enacted laws aimed at apothecaries who sold women “poisons” to induce a abortion, and New York declared post-quickening abortions a felony, and pre-quickening abortions a misdemeanor. As the medical profession advanced, physicians advocated…