Many doctors who were alarmed by the declining birth rate joined the attack on abortion. They broadened the definition of abortion by attacking the belief in quickening, which did not mark a woman as truly carrying a child until the point when she felt the fetus move in her womb, usually at about three months. A woman seeking a miscarriage before then did not abort because she wasn’t yet considered to be carrying a child. Between 1860 and 1890, forty states and territories outlawed abortion, with most rejecting the quickening doctrine.
