'I Was Appalled!' Nursing and Hospital Abortions in the United States, 1967-1973

Karissa Haugeberg, whose first book project considered the history of women in the American anti-abortion movement, will discuss her most recent research on the history of nurses who assisted with abortions in the United States between 1968 and 1973. When individual states began to legalize abortion in the late 1960s, many nurses felt unprepared to handle the volume of women who sought hospital-based elective abortions. Some nurses were accustomed to assisting women who had suffered miscarriages resented women who sought elective abortions. Others complained that while physicians could choose whether to perform abortions, nurses could be assigned to assist with the procedure, even if they objected to legal abortion. Haugeberg will discuss this interesting historical moment, when nurses, empowered by the resurgent feminist movement, demanded more control over their professional lives and sometimes directed their ire at those women who were exercising their legal right to abortion.