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Abortions were frequent in the early 1800s, occurring at approximately the same rates as they do today. Ads for “clinics for ladies” where “menstrual irregularities” from “whatever cause” could be addressed were common. People generally believed that abortion prior to quickening—feeling the first movements of the fetus—was “only slightly different from preventing conception.” With the establishment of the American Medical Association in 1847, male doctors worked to turn abortion, a simple medical procedure, into a moral debate. We continue to see the consequences of this move. Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are central to the anti-abortion movement’s ongoing attempts to produce abortion as undesirable. Today, there are more than 2600 CPCs in the U.S. and just 700 abortion clinics—numbers that were reversed in the 1980s. CPCs, which critics call “fake clinics,” are in all fifty states. In Middlebury, the CPC is called “The Women’s Center” and is located around the corner from the high school. It uses many of the misleading approaches that scholars have identified as patterns among CPCs. 

CPCS: A BRIEF HISTORY
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