When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, just months shy of the landmark abortion case’s 50th birthday, millions of Americans were stunned that the highest court in the land had just set our rights back half a century.

What we didn’t realize: Half a century is nothing. Less than two years after Roe fell, the conservative movement is taking women back not just 50 years. It’s rewinding the clock more than 150 years.

Case in point: Arizona’s abortion law, which is now in place statewide and which was passed 160 years ago, in 1864—when the Civil War was raging, before nearly a third of what are now the 50 U.S. states formally existed, and when women didn’t have the right to vote. Arizona itself wouldn’t be admitted to the Union for almost another half-century, having been recognized as an American territory only the year before.

That archaic 1864 law makes nearly all abortions a felony and threatens to lock up any abortion provider for a term of two to five years. The day after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that this archaic law could go into effect, Arizona Democrats tried to repeal it. Arizona Republicans in both legislative chambers blocked those repeal efforts, while Arizona anti-abortion advocates have fought to keep abortion rights off the ballot.

When the 1864 abortion law was passed, the territory’s Legislature was led by a pedophile who married, then divorced and sometimes impregnated (in and out of marriage), a series of children, girls who today would be in middle and early high school and largely too young to get their driver’s licenses, according to reporting from the Washington Post’s Monica Hesse. This was legal because, across the U.S., parents were allowed to marry off their young daughters, and the age of sexual consent was largely prepubescent, typically at 10 or 12. In Delaware, it was 7. The same document outlawing abortion in Arizona also outlawed interracial marriage and allowed for the indentured servitude of Native American children. There’s a whole section on electric telegraphs.

All of these laws were written by men. When Arizona passed its abortion law, not a single woman had yet been elected to any state legislature anywhere in the nation, and women would not hold any such role for several more decades. This was an era in which women were........

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