Abortion policy must be completely secular. In 1797, an American treaty with Tripoli declared that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." This reassurance to
Islam was written under Washington's presidency and approved by the Senate under John Adams.
The U.S. statutes against abortion have a nonsectarian history. They were put on the books when Catholics were a politically insignificant minority. Even the Protestant clergy were not a factor in these laws.
Rather, the laws were an achievement of the American Medical Association. From the early 19th century, Americans-even lay people-were exposed to enough information about embryology to enable them to make a critical and ethically significant distinction between contraception and abortion: the former practice did not terminate a new human life, but the latter one did. In 1827, Von Baer determined fertilization to be the starting point of individual life. By the 1850s, medical communities were advocating legislation to protect the unborn. In 1859, the American Medical Association protested legislation which only protected the unborn after
"quickening."
