William Howell wrote Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban. He modeled it on California’s
It was the era of the Wild West, when white men from back East were flooding into Arizona to reap the golden bounty of the land, take over territories and establish laws. William Howell, a New Yorker tasked with writing the code that would enshrine Arizona as a territory, cracked open the law books of a neighboring state as a model: California. He copied over swaths of the state’s legal text — ...
It was the era of the Wild West, when white men from back East were flooding into Arizona to reap the golden bounty of the land, take over territories and establish laws.
William Howell, a New Yorker tasked with writing the code that would enshrine Arizona as a territory, cracked open the law books of a neighboring state as a model: California. He copied over swaths of the state’s legal text — including a paragraph that criminalized abortions except when a mother’s life was at risk.
And on Tuesday, 160 years later, Howell’s words rose to relevance again, when Arizona’s Supreme Court, banning physicians from providing it in all cases except when a mother’s life is at risk.
