Women’s Reproductive Rights: Its Modern History and How Politics Have Affected its Medical Ethics

Throughout the twentieth century, women in the United States experienced varying degrees of reproductive freedom due to several different factors. Those factors included traditional gender roles, access to contraception, and eugenics, all of which impacted a woman's ability to find and receive healthcare. Many of the laws and standards upheld during this time allowed male politicians and physicians to regulate the field of medicine and therefore, ethics within medicine. The effects of these policies and politics' role in medicine have had a lasting impact on what qualifies as medical ethics in this country as well as more current issues, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade.