You have probably already heard a lot about the new Senate health care bill which, in addition to proposing massive cuts to Medicaid, promises to defund Planned Parenthood for one year due to the fact that they provide abortion services. You have probably read some of the endless media coverage of the proposed defunding: the New York Times declared that the issue is "bringing a decades-old debate over abortion to something of a climax, pitting powerful abortion rights groups, women’s organizations and medical associations against the wealthy religious organizations and anti-abortion groups that most Republicans lean on." You may have called your senator about the bill. Perhaps you took to social media to post about why we need to support Planned Parenthood and abortion rights (and got in an argument with someone you went to high school with in the comments).

But, for a brief moment, let's zoom out. Though constant (and sometimes violent) conflict over abortion rights is the norm in the US, it's actually completely different from how the conversation around reproductive rights plays out in most other countries in North America and Europe. The "abortion wars" are a unique American cultural institution. Which begs the question: why?

Across North America and Europe, abortion is not just widely legally available — it also often attracts substantially less public comment of any kind. This isn't to say that abortion law in these countries is always more liberal than the US: Northern Ireland continues to ban abortion except under threats to the mother's life or permanent risk to her health, as per a 1861 law; Poland's proposed abortion bans drew massive protests last year, and women can be prosecuted for having abortions under many circumstances in Mexico.

But by and large, the abortion debate plays out differently in these countries. No European countries have made major moves to defund abortion providers. British doctors have just asked for abortion to be totally decriminalized, and France's National Assembly recently voted to penalize anti-abortion websites that pose as neutral sources but actually "exert psychological or moral pressure” on women to keep the pregnancy. Denmark is so pro-choice that information about how to get an abortion is found on the official website of the city of Copenhagen, and even hyper-conservative Italy — where abortion is legal in the first trimester but up to 70 percent of doctors refuse to perform one — is gradually legalizing medication abortion (aka "the abortion pill") to give women more options.

And despite the fact that some Western countries have more restrictive abortion laws than the US, violence against abortion providers and attacks at abortion clinics is almost unheard of in other places.

So why is abortion such a hot-button issue in the US? The answer seems to be embedded in America's unique cultural and historic baggage.

US Ideas About Sexuality Also Shaped Our Abortion Debate According to many historians, US attitudes about sexuality (which often intertwined with racist thought) also played a huge role in the development of our abortion culture. Gilda Sedgh, a principal research scientist with the Guttmacher Institute, told Foreign Policy that the difference between US and European attitudes towards abortion is tied to Europe's “social acceptance of premarital sexual activity and contraceptive use.” And historian Anna M. Peterson argues that some of the difference stems from how white abortion-seeking women themselves were treated. By the late 1800s, "people in both Europe and the U.S.," she writes, "had long expressed sympathy for women who had abortions and many believed abortions helped unfortunate women in difficult situations. American anti-abortionists instead put forth an image of women who procured abortions as frivolous and promiscuous." She quotes the American Medical Association's J. Milton Duff, who declared abortion in 1893 to be "a pernicious crime against God and society." (It should be noted again, of course, that these attitudes of sympathy or concern were aimed almost exclusively at white women; women of color often found themselves subjected to eugenics-based efforts to control their reproduction). White physicians were the big instigators behind the anti-abortion push in America in this period, but in the UK, people generally thought of abortion-seeking women differently. They characterized women who had them as "desperate and destitute," victims of socioeconomic conditions instead of moral failings. (Other countries also saw it differently: Russia thought the rise of abortions in the 1890s was a product of capitalist excess, and the fight for birth control in France in the early 20th century was led by anarchists. Context, when it comes to abortion, has always mattered a lot.)

The Difference Between American & European Feminism Also Played A Role LSE Library Anna Peterson also argues, as do other historians, that the culture of American abortion arguments can be traced to the differences between feminist thought in the US and Europe. American pro-choice feminism talked about women's rights to control their own bodies — though, as Leslie Reagan has noted, a lot of early American feminists weren't pro-abortion at all, or only accepted that the procedure might occur when women were abandoned by men or were "loose." By contrast, European feminist thinking framed the abortion debate in terms of "public health and humanitarianism," arguing that legal abortion was necessary for every woman to have the best chance at health. Take, for example, the way in which people talked about abortion in Weimar Germany, from 1918 to the 1940s. "Abortion," writes Weimar historian Cornelia Usborne, "would become superfluous in a society where inequality was abolished." This is not to say that European, British, Australian, and other feminist activists working for abortion rights didn't have a fight on their hands. Most countries have had their own internal squabbles about abortion's legality and criminalization; but its unique status in American culture may also have been partially created by the moral framing of America's attitudes.