The abortion market was a powerful economic force in American life. Before legalization lowered the cost, one million women each year collectively paid upward of $750 million for abortions. In this illuminating book, Katherine Parkin reveals the strength of a massive consumer market that involved loans, advertising, and travel, as well as the costs associated with the procedure itself. Laying the foundation for the emergence of a public market that facilitated the buying and selling of abortions, wealthy population control ideologues encouraged positive public discourse on abortion, funded medical studies, and waged legal battles. White, middle- and upper-class women sought out abortions and paid exorbitantly for them. Male entrepreneurs emerged to capitalize on the booming market and profit from the incredible demand. Advertising on billboards and in college newspapers, men profited by providing the phone number, getting kickbacks for delivering patients, and arranging for women's travel to Mexico, Puerto Rico, England, and Japan. Students demanded abortion access and organized when it came at a steep cost, especially to the poorest among them. Abortion providers in Kansas, California, and Washington, D.C. attracted out-of-state consumers, with some women aided by their universities or by medical insurance. Between 1970 and 1973, entrepreneurs, providers, and hundreds of thousands of women seeking to buy abortions headed to New York City, heralded by some as the "abortion capital of the world." While we may have imagined that securing an abortion was best understood as a hidden, woman-only experience, The Abortion Market reveals the extent to which businesses and businessmen openly selling abortion access shaped the experience of buying abortions for millions of women.
Katherine J. Parkin is Professor of History at Monmouth University. She is author of Women at the Wheel: A Century of Buying, Driving, and Fixing Cars and Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
"The Abortion Market provides an important missing piece in the history of one of the most divisive and politically impactful issues in the United States. Parkin's gripping account of the economic forces shaping abortion practice before Roe shows how the market for abortion not only shaped medical treatment but also abortion politics itself."-- "Mary Ziegler, author of Roe: The History of a National Obsession" "The Abortion Market is a compelling, necessary account of the financial exploitation of abortion seekers in the decade before Roe v. Wade. In those years, abortion entrepreneurs capitalized on women's desperate circumstances to make incredible profits; women overcame monumental financial, emotional, and logistical hurdles to get the medical procedure; while activists, friends, and universities eventually worked to aid abortion seekers and curtail the industry's worst abuses. Katherine J. Parkin follows the money through the abortion marketplace and, in so doing, offers an indispensable, cautionary tale for our modern moment."-- "Jennifer Holland, author of Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement" "The Abortion Market is a revelation. Katherine J. Parkin follows the money to see where and how women accessed abortion in the decade before Roe. The result is a fascinating and wide-ranging account that demonstrates the profits gained by abortion providers and referral services as well as the motives of the philanthropists who financed the campaign for legalization, mostly in the name of stemming a supposed crisis in overpopulation. This is required reading as we face another crisis of abortion accessibility in our own era."-- "Nicholas L. Syrett, author of The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America's Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime"
