The 1864 abortion law was eventually abolished in Arizona. On the third attempt, Republican elected officials resigned themselves to abandoning the project of subjecting women to a legislative corset dating from the time when Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was president. Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs signed the repeal into law on Thursday, May 2.
Two Republican senators broke with party discipline and voted with Democrats on 1er May, to invalidate this law which practically completely prohibits abortion. Three Republicans had had the same audacity a week earlier. The renegades incurred the wrath of one of Arizona’s chief extremists, Anthony Kern, who is still a member of the Senate, although he was involved in the 2020 plot to award Donald Trump the electoral votes won by Joe Biden during the presidential election. The elected official compared abortion to Nazi practices, and called for divine intervention. “Our only hope is Jesus,” he meant.
The text returned to the spotlight on April 9: the state supreme court then declared it still applicable because it had never been formally abolished, although another law had been adopted in the meantime setting at fifteen weeks – without exception for rape or incest – the time limit for obtaining an abortion. An example, one more, of the confusion reigning in the United States since the Supreme Court returned the right to abortion to the discretion of the federal states in June 2022.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson retraced the epic story of the 1864 text on her blog, when Arizona was still just a territory. To try to civilize the landscape a little, 27 men met in Prescott, in the north of the state, in September 1864. Their first task was to adopt the penal code prepared by one man, Judge William T. Howell. The second to allow one of them to divorce his wife. Then they allow mines and train companies to prosper.
Support from California
The Howell Code was mainly intended to curb the settling of scores among a population of outlaws, at a time when the Civil War was not yet over in the Union. Abortion is only discussed in the context of prohibiting one individual from poisoning another; anyone who uses poison or instruments “with the intention of causing a miscarriage in a woman with a child” will be punishable by two to five years in prison, the text stipulates. The code further orders that the testimony of black people is not admissible in court, and sets the age of consent in matters of sexual relations at 10 years. And this is the text that conservatives in Arizona revere, insists the historian on her blog.
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