Alito on how Blackstone and Hale show the abortion was always illegal, not just "post-quickening"
From the document (does anyone have an OCR'd version?): Although a pre-quickening abortion was not itself considered homicide, it does not follow that abortion was permissible at common law--much less that abortion was a legal right. Quite to the contrary, in the 1732 case mentioned above, the judge said of the charge of abortion (with no mention of quickening) that he had "never met with a case so barbarous and unnatural." Similarly, an indictment from 1602, which did not distinguish between a pre-quickening a post-quickening abortion , described abortion as "pernicious" and "against the peace of our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity." That the common law did not condone even pre-quickening abortions is confirmed by what one might call a proto-felony-murder rule. Hale and Blackstone described a way in which a pre-quickening abortion could rise to the level of a homicide . Hale wrote that if a physician gave a woman "with child" a ...