The Civil War raged and fortune-seekers hunted for gold. This era produced Arizona’s abortion ban

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Union and Confederate armies clashed in a bloody fourth year of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln tasked one man to create the legal code for Arizona, almost 50 years before the territory became a state.

New York judge William Thompson Howell wrote 500 pages that spanned provisions on dueling, accidental homicides by ax and age of consent that would govern the newly formed territory of fewer than 7,000 people. But tucked within the “Howell Code,” just after the section on duels, was an abortion law criminalizing the administering of “any medicinal substances… with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child.”

That was 160 years ago. Last week, that same 1864 provision was resurrected by the Arizona Supreme Court, which upheld the near-total ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, a decision that quickly rippled across the political landscape of one of the nation’s most important presidential battleground states.

This law’s revival is just the latest instance of long-dormant restrictions influencing current abortion policies after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which once granted a federal right to abortion.

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