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A revealing investigation into how businesses and businessmen selling abortion access shaped the experience of buying abortions for millions of women between 1962 and 1972
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.
"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."
"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."
"Parkin provides compelling evidence to show the pervasiveness of the abortion market in the pre-Roe United States - truly painting a picture of the economic factors and decisions at play for women seeking these procedures ... this book is a fascinating read. It makes tangible and clear an aspect of the abortion industry and market that has previously been overlooked."
— Alicia Gutierrez-Romine
"Parkin offers a critical analysis of movement history through financing that highlights how abortion access has been shaped by political and economic interests that prioritize control over bodily autonomy. . . . The Abortion Marketis a rigorous and timely contribution that expands familiar narratives about abortion before Roe. By centering the consumer economics of care, Parkin shows that abortion access has long been structured by inequality."
— Jamie Morgan
"What this work illuminates is the entrance into the realm of abortion access of a range of other entrepreneurs, eager to profit from women in a predicament."
— Lesley A. Hall