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 — 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 ruled that the state would return to the original code on abortion, banning physicians from providing it in all cases except when a mother’s life is at risk. “History doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” said Melanie Sturgeon, a retired state archivist and co-founder and president of Arizona Women’s History Alliance. “You need to understand what’s going on … in the territory or state and those next to us, and what’s happening nationally that affects us.” California, with its promises of gold, began attracting
