On This Day: Iceland legalizes clinical abortions - Jan. 28, 1935
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He who returns from a storm has experience. (Icelandic proverb) Eighty Years Ago Iceland Legalised Abortion
Feb. 16, 2015
... on 28 January Iceland had something else to be proud of, namely its progressiveness: precisely 80 years ago – on 28 January 1935 – Iceland legalised abortion, the first Western country to do so. The global economic crisis of the 1930s had hit this country, where the most important natural resource was fish. Exports fell off rapidly, factories were forced to close, jobs disappeared, and the population (approximately 110,000 at the time) quickly descended into poverty. How were women expected to feed their families, to say nothing of come up with the money for contraceptives?
During this time of economic suffering, a pregnancy represented a potential catastrophe. Abortion was punished with eight years at a labour camp. But politicians and the medical community were aware of the women’s plight and did what they could to help. In fact, abortions were performed by doctors and at hospitals so that women wouldn’t die from back-alley procedures as in other countries.
The Icelandic Medical Association’s chairman was the Social-Democratic MP Dr. Vilmundur Jónsson (1889-1972). Although his party held only about one fifth of the seats in Parliament, he’s considered the father of the abortion law. Social circumstances were taken into account: “... if the woman previously gave birth to several children in rapid succession and the last was born recently, or if the woman suffers from extremely grim domestic circumstances due to several children that are not provided for, poverty or serious illness in her household”.
The first of any country to legalise abortion, the Soviet Union, did so in 1920, though prohibition was reinstated under Joseph Stalin to ensure the largest possible population.
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https://muvs.org/en/museum/newsletter/2015-02-16-he-who-returns-from-a-storm-has-experience-icelandic-proverb-eighty-years-ago-iceland-legalised-abortion/
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Ask the Internet which country was the first to legalize abortion and you’re likely to find some confusing answers, many of which point in one direction: Iceland.
It’s true that, 80 years ago, on Jan. 28 of 1935, Iceland’s “Law No. 38” declared that the mother’s health and “domestic conditions” may be taken into consideration when considering whether to permit doctors to perform an abortion. And, according to the 1977 book Abortion by Malcolm Potts, Peter Diggory and John Peel, that law stuck for decades.
However, there are a lot of caveats to that “first” label. For one thing, abortion spent centuries as neither illegal nor legal, before becoming formally legislated, which happened in the 19th century in many places. Iceland, then, was the first Western nation to create what we might now recognize as a common modern abortion legalization policy, with a set of conditions making the procedure not impossible but not entirely unregulated.
Some other nations that passed abortion laws before Iceland’s (like Mexico, for example) also included conditions, like rape, under which it would be permitted. And, as Robertson’s Book of Firsts clarifies, the Soviet Union had actually legalized abortion, on demand, more than a decade earlier. The difference was that (a) the Soviet law didn’t last, as that nation underwent a series of regime changes, and (b) the conditions for legality were different. Though abortion was later strictly limited in Russia, legalization was apparently no small thing when it was first introduced.
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https://time.com/3679288/iceland-abortion/
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