Mid 1800s New York City was an interesting and potentially terrifying place to be. During the 19th century, the city underwent rapid growth with immigrants flooding in such that the population quadrupled from 200,000 to 800,000 people between 1820 and 1860 alone. Many of you listening right now are probably descended from immigrants who at least passed through New York City in the 1800s. The industrial revolution transformed the city into a bustling hub of commerce and economic prosperity for some, where the American dream could be realized with hard work and a little bit of luck. But this dream, of course, drew many many others who would struggle to realize it themselves, trapped in violent slums and living in squalor, multiple generations sometimes packed into a single room. Amidst this disparate chaos, one immigrant woman named Ann Lohman managed to climb her way out of the slums and into a brownstone mansion on 5th avenue. But her means of doing this rubbed some people the wrong way. Ann, alias Madame Restell, was a notorious abortionist operating in New York City with satellite offices in Philadelphia and Boston. She built an empire selling married women birth control and performing procedures to help them end unwanted pregnancies. Soon after she began this profitable practice, there were many who hoped to take her down, put a stop to it. But not for the reasons you might expect. Not for the reasons people oppose abortion today. Turns out, abortion, though mostly unseen and unspoken of, has been mostly an accepted necessity throughout history. It wasn’t until the mid 1800s when women like Madame Restell rose up, challenging the status quo that abortion became controversial. Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I know this is a tender topic, abortion. I’m going to tread lightly here. But there are some pretty major historical misconceptions to rectify that, I think, significantly impact the way we view abortion today. I mean our story takes place in the mid 1800s but this is still a really hot topic right now and so I think the historical context is more important than ever. Because, okay so the reason most people oppose abortion today is because it’s a baby right. It’s a living baby with a heartbeat, it’s alive, and by ending the pregnancy you are effectively taking a life which you should not be allowed to do. It’s a valid argument which is why it’s such a conundrum, right it’s such a pressing ethical, moral conundrum. But I don’t think many people know how new of a thing that is, thinking that way. Throughout time, abortion was mostly okay. During certain periods it wasn’t it’s sort of swung back and forth like a pendulum of “okay it’s fine we need it” and “eh, I don’t know, I don’t like it.” But even in the “eh, I don’t know, I don’t like it” periods, it was never about killing unborn babies. That was never the problem people had with it until very recently. They had totally different qualms that mostly had to do with the women themselves misbehaving. They didn’t like it because it allowed women to cover up adulterous relationships. During the 14, 1500s, it was linked to witchcraft, women performing abortions were practicing witchcraft. In the 1800s, when our story takes place, they worried that birth control and access to abortions would lead to a decline in female virtue, that women would be sleeping around just like men had always done with zero consequences. They worried that middle and upper class women, the ones who could mostly afford these services, would stop having children and the country would be overrun with poor immigrants. And they worried, especially in the case of Madame Restell, they worried that women were becoming too successful in the medical field, a field they wanted to keep entirely male. So, surprisingly, and contrary to what most people probably believe, no one is caring about the unborn babies. That’s not even on their radar. Any time controversy over abortion has arisen throughout history, until recent decades, it has always been about controlling women, making sure they aren’t being promiscuous and adulterous, fear of witchcrafty, and keeping them out of the medical field. And I think it’s important for people to realize that. Because, while modern day concerns about abortion are valid, they are very new and they sprung up from abortion opposers with completely different motives. 

 

So, let’s take a quick look at abortion throughout history before we get into the story of Madame Restell in 19th century New York City. As long as there have been humans, there has been some attempt to control or end pregnancies. Because, the thing is, men are not simply going to abstain when a family has grown large enough. That’s out of the question for some reason. And without some sort of intervention, women are going to continue to get pregnant and have babies that they possibly cannot afford, cannot care for, or that endanger their lives because if you listened to my childbirth episode, you know how incredibly dangerous it has always been. So there have always been women who have found themselves in the predicament of, I don’t want to have any more children but I can’t keep this guy off me so it’s going to happen. And what you have to understand is, it’s not like “eh, I just don’t wanna.” It’s not a selfish thing. For many of these women it means not being able to feed those babies. Watching those babies starve and die. It means potentially dying yourself in childbirth. Leaving all your other children without a mother. You almost died last time. Your midwife told you next time, you won’t be so lucky. But, you can’t keep this guy off you. He’s stronger than you physically and marital rape was legal until 1993 in the US. So what are you going to do? Okay that’s the situation we’re talking about and the reason why abortion has mostly been accepted, although definitely private and not talked about and sort of left up to women, throughout history. Just like childbirth. Childbirth, abortions, just do it, go take care of it. I don’t want to hear about it. That was how men viewed these things historically. Woman stuff. 

 

There are records of abortions occurring dating all the way back to ancient Egypt. We have writing on an ancient Egyptian papyrus from 3,500 years ago describing a method of inducing abortion that uses, essentially a tampon coated in a compound made of honey and crushed dates. And I’m like, yeah I don’t think that worked, but who knows. They were giving it a go anyway. In ancient Greek writing, there are lots of references to herbs and such that were thought to induce abortion or work as a form of birth control. In 411 BC the playwright Aristophanes, who I talked about a couple weeks ago in the Aspasia episode, wrote in one of his plays of a desirable young woman who was quote “trimmed and spruced with pennyroyal, end quote. Pennyroyal is an herb in the mint family commonly used in traditional folk medicine that has long been thought to induce abortions. Madame Restell will use it herself 2,200 years after Aristophanes mentioned it in his play. In ancient Greece and Rome we have silphium. I talked about silphium in great detail in episode 68 about lost technology. It was a plant, and I say was because it is no longer in existence, we don’t think. It seems to have gone extinct. But this plant was super sought after in the ancient world and super valuable, as valuable as gold and silver. The ancient Greeks even put it on their coins. It was used for all kinds of things, they ate it, seasoned food with it, and they used it as medicine, and as an abortifacient, to end unwanted pregnancies early on. Considering childbirth was the leading cause of death among women in ancient Rome, preventing or ending a pregnancy was quite often a desperate, life saving measure, and silphium may have been the first actually effective form of contraceptive. A Greek physician, Soranus of Ephesus, wrote that silphium would induce menstruation and quote “destroy any [fetus] already existing,” end quote. Roman chronicler Pliny the Elder also wrote of silphium's ability to prevent and also end a pregnancy. According to Katie Hunt in an article for CNN, modern studies using ferula plants, which I guess are related to the now extinct silphium, have shown anti-fertility properties in experiments with rodents. So while we can’t actually test silphium today, many experts believe that it was actually effective as a contraceptive in ancient Greece and Rome and that this probably contributed to the overuse of the plant that led to it going extinct. Because they could never figure out how to cultivate it. It could only be found growing in the wild until it was gone, probably because of climate change and also just overharvesting. 

 

Anyway, according to Maeve Callan, professor and historian of religion at Simpson College and author of the book “Sacred Sisters: Gender, Sanctity, and Power in Medieval Ireland,” even Catholics accepted abortion in the past. Callan says in that CNN article quote “People act like there’s only one acceptable attitude towards abortion if you’re Catholic, or if you’re Christian more broadly, or even if you’re religious more broadly. And there’s always been a diversity of viewpoints,” end quote. In her book, she writes about four different Irish saints from the medieval period who counted performing abortions among the miracles they performed. Callan says quote “The miracles show people’s attitudes toward abortion and in some circumstances it was seen as acceptable, even as a miraculous blessing,” end quote. But the timing of it mattered. In original Catholic teachings, a fetus didn’t become an actual person until a few months into a pregnancy once it received its soul. And this is called ensoulment. So before ensoulment, it was acceptable to terminate a pregnancy. After that, it was not. And these ideas will carry on, that a fetus is not a person until around the end of the first trimester when the mother first feels it move, which was called quickening. Callan says that the idea that life begins at conception only arose in Catholic teachings around 150 years ago, which just so happens to be when today’s story takes place. So let’s head there now to figure out why this shift in thinking really took place. 

 

Before we go to New York City, we have to go to England, where Madame Restell was born. But that wasn’t her real name of course. She was born Ann Trow in 1812 in the small town of Painswick, England. Her parents worked in a mill and her family was quite poor. She likely received very little education as a poor millworker's daughter with seven brothers. At the age of 15 she went to work as a live-in maid and at 16 she married a tailor named Henry Summers who was 7 years older than she was. In 1830, so she was 18 years old, she gave birth to a daughter named Caroline. But Henry and Ann struggled financially. They struggled to provide for their daughter and so the next year, 1831, they decided, like so many others, to emigrate to New York City for better opportunities, a better life. They arrive, off the boat, penniless, with hordes of others in the same situation, this one year old baby, and they settle into an apartment a few blocks south of the infamous Five Points neighborhood. Five Points was once known as the worst slum in America. It is the setting of the movie Gangs of New York, if you’ve ever seen that. The Five Points neighborhood is where that movie takes place mostly. And it’s where Ann and Henry and one year old Caroline live when they first arrive in New York. But then, soon after arrival, Henry dies of a fever, leaving 19 year old Ann alone in a foreign country, in the slums, by herself, to care for an infant with no money. That’s a bad situation. I can’t even imagine. She worked as a seamstress to try to support herself and Caroline but the pay was abysmal and the hours were long. There was no climbing out of the slums as a seamstress in the 1830s. But, during this time, she met William Evans, who Nandini Subramanium writing for the Science History Institute describes as the neighborhood quack. Subramanium says that Evans quote “sold an assortment of proprietary pills, powders, and poultices with varying degrees of efficacy. Under his tutelage, she soon began discreetly selling her own contraceptives,” end quote. So let’s pause to talk about what a quack is real quick. A quack is basically someone who professes to have medical knowledge or training but actually does not, like a fake doctor. And they would do this, they would make up these fake medical credentials, because they wanted to sell you something, some miraculous medicine, powder, pill, salve, tonic, ointment, whatever, that would solve all of your problems. And that sounds awful right. Like, how dare these guys, they’re con artists. But, what you have to understand is that until very recently, until like the 1800s when our story takes place, pretty much all doctors are quacks. There is not a whole lot of like organized medical training going on. You do not need a medical degree from a prestigious university to practice medicine at this point. Traditionally, just anyone who thought they could do it got to do it. You think you know what’s wrong with me? You think you can save my life? Come on then. Go for it. And so doctors, physicians for much of history, they don’t have degrees and licenses and certifications to practice medicine, letters after their names like doctors do today. They just have experience and they’re willing to give it a go. And that’s enough for people. But, starting really in the 1800s, that starts to shift. We have the emergence of the American Medical Association, the AMA, in 1847 with the purpose of, you know, vetting these guys, making sure that doctors are actually trained professionals who know what they’re doing. So to be a quack, like William Evans, in the 1830s isn’t so crazy as it seems to us today. We’re thinking of him as like a snake oil peddler, right, trying to trick people into buying bogus remedies. But, in reality, he was actually probably really trying to help people and heal people. And so Ann gets wrapped up with him and she starts to get involved in making and selling contraceptives. And this is nothing new either. This is something, as I said, this is something women have always done. This is in the realms of midwives and wise women who would, during certain times, be twisted into witches and killed by the tens of thousands. These women concocted traditional herbal remedies that had been used since ancient times and they did this to make money, yes, but also to help other women. And one of the greatest ways they could help other women, save other women, was by helping them prevent and end pregnancies.  

 

So Ann starts messing around in this industry. In 1836, she remarried, probably out of necessity, but she did also happen to like her new husband, Charles Lohman. Charles was a Russian immigrant who worked for the New York Herald. And he was a proponent of population control which I guess would have made him rather woke for the time. He had published articles in the Herald about contraceptives and family planning and so he’s actually totally cool with what Ann is doing selling homemade contraceptives and encourages her to do it and to expand her practice. So what is Ann actually selling these women? Because there aren’t like birth control pills in the 1830s. There actually weren’t birth control pills until the 1960s which is crazy to think about. According to Smithsonian magazine, women would have been using things like pennyroyal, savin, black draught, tansy tea, oil of cedar, ergot of rye, mallow, and motherwort to try to prevent pregnancies. And some of this stuff may have worked and a lot of it probably didn’t. According to Subramanium, Ann was most likely using ergot of rye in the 1830s. And if you listened to my Salem Witch trials episode, then you have heard of ergot and ergot poisoning before. That is actually one of the theories as to why the girls in Salem were acting so crazy and having convulsions and hallucinations. Ergot is a type of fungus that grows on rye which is used to make bread. And this fungus was known to cause contractions of the uterus. It was even used during labor sometimes, to speed it up, to speed up labor and delivery. So Ann is just using it earlier in a pregnancy in hopes that it will basically induce labor and lead to a miscarriage, that’s the idea. But you had to be very careful with how much ergot you took because too much could constrict blood flow in the arteries and cause gangrene of tissue as well as convulsions and hallucinations which is why it’s a compelling theory to explain the bizarre behavior of the girls in Salem. But that’s what Ann is peddling initially. 

 

And, I don’t know if it’s working or what, but Ann’s contraceptive becomes extremely popular among women in New York. And she starts making actual money. She gives up her seamstress job. They move into a nicer apartment in a better part of the city. And they even have enough money for Ann and Caroline to return to England to visit her family in 1838. And that’s a big deal. Immigrants who came to the United States typically had no intention of ever returning to their home countries. Not that they didn’t want to, not that they didn’t want to see their families again, they just couldn’t usually. They didn’t have the means. They couldn’t afford a return trip like that. They barely made it out. They weren’t going back. So the fact that Ann returned to England for a visit with her family means they were doing quite well financially by 1838. And so her husband Charles, clever Charles, he concocts a devious plan to turn the England trip into something that will boost Ann’s burgeoning career. When she returns, they splurge on a nice office in a fancy part of town and they start telling people that Ann actually went to France where she trained under her fictional grandmother, who was like a master midwife, to become a legit safe knowledgeable female physician. And at this point, to support the story and sound more sophisticated, she starts going by the name Madame Restell. 

 

And they really up their game at this point. They start putting ads in the newspaper and mailing contraceptives all over the country. And these newspaper ads, they’re sort of trying to keep it on the DL but like it’s not too hard to figure out what they’re selling. And all of this is geared towards married women. Contraceptives were only for married women. No one was trying to sell them to unmarried women because they didn’t want to enable like promiscuity before marriage, that sort of thing. Contraceptives and abortions were just for married women who already had enough children and didn’t want to have any more. That was the angle. So these ads say things like this one from the New York Herald from 1840 that reads quote “To married women - Madame Restell, female physician, is happy to have it in her power to say that since the introduction into this country about a year ago of her celebrated preventative powders for married ladies, whose health forbids a too rapid increase of family, hundreds have availed the [something, it’s hard to read], of their use with a success and satisfaction that has at once dispelled the fears and doubts of the most timid and skeptical; for notwithstanding that for twenty years they have been used in Europe with invariable success (first introduced by the celebrated midwife and female physician Madame Restell, the grandmother of the advertiser, who made this subject her particular and special study),” end quote. And believe it or not that is not even the end of that sentence but we’ll stop it there. Holy run on sentences. 

 

This legitimizes her in a lot of people’s minds, this made up training under the famed Parisian midwife Madame Restell, her grandmother, and these newspaper ads mean that they are now mailing these powders, these contraceptive powders all over the place. And her office in New York is jam packed with women seeking her services. According to the New York Historical Society, Ann, who now goes by Madame Restell, her Manhattan office was open from 9 am to 10 pm and there was often a line of women waiting at the door for her to open each day. So there’s obviously a high demand for what she is selling. However, these powders, these contraceptive powders weren’t all that effective. But that’s okay, because if it failed and you ended up pregnant, you could just go back and for some more money you could buy her abortion medicine to terminate the pregnancy. But when that failed, because it usually did, you could just go back again and get a minor surgical procedure which she performed in a back room to actually effectively end the pregnancy. For that she charged wealthy women $100 and poor women $20. Which is more like $3,500 and $700ish dollars. And, with a line out the door daily, additional offices in Philadelphia and Boston, and a mail order business booming, Madame Restell quickly became very wealthy. She built a brownstone mansion on the corner of 52nd street and 5th avenue. She had a luxurious carriage drawn by 4 horses and a liveried coachman, which meant he wore like a special fancy uniform which I guess was a big deal. She’s wearing furs, she’s dripping with diamonds and pearls. And while, people have until now mostly just sort of turned a blind eye to these sorts of practices, this is a bit too much to ignore and she starts to draw some negative attention as successful women so often do. 

 

According to the New York Historical Society quote “In New York State, doctors who wanted to take control of women’s medicine had passed a law… that made providing an abortion a crime punishable by a year in jail and a $100 fine. But in order for someone to be prosecuted, they had to be reported to the authorities. Since most people did not care too much, the law was not widely upheld,” end quote. I want to dig into that real quick, doctors who wanted to take control of women’s medicine. According to the Science History Institute quote “By the 1840s medicine had begun professionalizing, but gynecology was slow to follow. Specializing in gynecology was generally frowned on—it was dismissed as women’s business and deemed unsuitable for dignified men. Childbirth was the realm of midwives, and midwives had no place in the medical field. As a result, men studying medicine were given sparse training on women’s health and reproductive care. Those who chose to specialize in the field were often seen as perverse and lecherous‚ scoundrels preying on feeble women. Despite this prejudice, some physicians still chose to specialize in women’s disease, though the training they received was often rooted in speculation instead of tested observation,” end quote. 

 

So men know nothing about women’s health and haven’t cared to try to find anything out about it. But they also, around this time, start wanting to professionalize medicine and get rid of quacks. This is when midwives start to get ousted because they are mostly women and women cannot be professionals. They cannot attend medical schools and therefore they cannot be legit doctors or physicians. And so they start to criminalize the things that these women, these midwives, have traditionally always done, including abortion. Remember the American Medical Association, the AMA, which came about in the 1840s to try to formalize medicine and determine you know what actually counts as a legit doctor? Well they certainly didn’t include midwives and really cast them aside as quacks. According to the Science History Institute quote “Other forces in the medical establishment conspired to disempower women. The American Medical Association (AMA) was founded in 1847, and one of its first initiatives was to advocate for the criminalization of abortion nationwide, pushing midwives further to the sideline,” end quote. 

 

And so when Madame Restell is doing this, pretty openly, starting in the 1840s, it’s not exactly legal. But she has to actually be turned in to the authorities by a victim or like a witness to face charges. Which happens actually, pretty early on when a patient of hers named Maria Purdy makes a deathbed confession to her husband. Maria is dying of tuberculosis, something completely unrelated to Restell’s services. But she begins to feel that she’s caused this somehow by having gone to see Restell and she confesses to her husband. Madame Restell had given her a yellow liquid that was mostly oil of tansy and spirits of turpentine. But when that failed, she underwent a surgical procedure to end her pregnancy. And now, a year later, here she is dying of tuberculosis and she’s convinced herself that it’s Madame Restell’s fault. This goes to court but the charges ultimately get dropped when Maria Purdy’s confession is deemed inadmissible in court. And Madame Restell carries on with her business. But this publicity caused an absolute outrage in the press. Madame Restell was called the quote “wickedest woman in New York” and  a quote “monster in human shape” responsible for quote “one of the most hellish acts ever perpetrated in Christian land,” which like, dramatic, and also no. But guys, it’s still not even about dead babies. They accused her of allowing women to quote “commit as many adulteries as there are hours in the year without the possibility of detection,” end quote. According to Abbott Kahler writing for Smithsonian magazine people claimed she quote “encouraged prostitution by removing the consequences. She allowed wives to shirk the duties of motherhood. She insulted poor women by providing abortions when they could seek aid and solace from their church. She not only abetted immoral behavior but also harmed misguided and naïve women, acting as a quote “hag of misery” preying upon human weakness,” end quote. These were the criticisms made by the press. Notice how absolutely no one at this point is concerned about killing unborn babies. It’s all about controlling the behavior of women. 

 

In 1847 a woman named Maria Bodine came to Madame Restell’s office to get an abortion but, upon examining her, it was determined that she was too far along. Remember, Madame Restell would only perform abortions before the fetus had reached that quickening stage around the end of the first trimester or three months. And she was pretty sure Maria Bodine was past that point so she offered, instead, a room in her boarding house. Because this was another service Restell offered. She had a boarding house for pregnant women who needed basically a place to lay low until the baby was born. And then she also helped arrange adoptions for the babies. So she tried to push this woman in that direction instead. However, the woman’s unnamed lover, the man, the baby daddy paid Madame Restell a visit and insisted that she perform the abortion. Restell refused multiple times before finally giving in and surgically ending the woman’s pregnancy. Afterwards, in pain, Maria Bodine went to a doctor who reported her to the police and Madame Restell was arrested. And she actually served a year in prison this time. Upon her release, she vowed to stop performing surgical abortions. She just sold pills and offered stays in her boarding house and adoption arrangements for pregnant women. Also, to improve her image, she applied for and was granted US citizenship in 1854. And actually assimilated herself into high society so well at this point that the mayor of New York, Jacob A. Westervelt, actually officiated her daughter’s wedding. 

 

But not everyone was willing to let bygones be bygones. One man in particular was determined to take down Madame Restell once and for all. Enter Anthony Comstock. And I’m going to read you the Science History Institute’s introduction of him because I think it’s pretty great. It begins quote “Anthony Comstock was never much fun,” and that really is the truth. They go on quote “During the Civil War, he watched with horror as his fellow soldiers drank, caroused, and otherwise debased themselves. Soon after the war he moved to New York City, where he encountered quacks, con artists, sex workers, and moral degenerates of all types.

Perhaps most troubling to Comstock was the sheer volume of young men engaging in debauchery—buying lurid dime novels, smoking tobacco, having rampant premarital sex. He sought refuge in the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), where he railed against the evils of pornography, bank fraud, gambling, infidelity, women’s suffrage, and anything else he decreed a vice. [yes women’s suffrage was considered a vice] Five years of fighting for Christian morals with the YMCA established Comstock as a force within the anti-vice movement. In 1873 he created a vigilante organization dedicated to maintaining public decency. That same year he coauthored and convinced Congress to pass the Comstock Act, which prohibited the mailing of quote “obscene” materials, including pornography… contraceptives, abortifacients, or any advertisement or correspondence referring to them. He was appointed special agent for the postmaster general, and from that position he set the machinery of the U.S. Mail against the malevolent forces he believed were corrupting the nation’s youth. To Comstock, there were few forces as dangerous as Madame Restell,” end quote. 

So the Comstock law made it illegal to mail anything considered obscene which included even just information about reproductive health and especially quote “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion,” end quote. Even just telling someone where they could find this information was punishable by a prison sentence of 6 months to 5 years and a fine of up to $2,000. And remember, Madame Restell is mailing her contraceptive powders and pills all over the place. So she becomes public enemy number one in his eyes and he concocts a plan to take her down. In 1878 he arrived at her office posing as a concerned husband. He said he was a married man whose wife had already given him too many children and he was concerned for her health if she were to have another one and he wanted Madame Restell’s help to prevent that. So she sold him some pills for his wife and sent him on his way. The next day, he returned to her office with the police and had her arrested. They searched her office and found pamphlets about birth control as well as quote “instruments” and instructions for how to use them. 

So Madame Restell is set to go to trial again for selling Comstock birth control pills for his fictional wife. But this time, there will be no trial. On April 1, 1878, the day of her trial, she is found dead of an apparent suicide in her bathtub. The St. Johnsbury Caledonian reported on April 5th quote “Madame Restell, otherwise known as Ann Lohman, cut her throat with a carving knife, and was found dead in her bathtub early yesterday morning. The estate which she has left is estimated to be worth half a million of dollars. She will be remembered as a noted abortionist,” end quote. Because she had died on April 1st, April Fools Day, Comstock initially thought the whole thing was an April Fool’s joke. When he realized it was true he penned a final comment in the file he had on her, writing quote “a bloody end to a bloody life.” 

Between 1860 and 1880, 40 different anti-abortion laws were passed in the US, mostly as part of the newly formed AMA’s attempts to regulate and professionalize medicine and exclude women from practicing. This carried on and was fairly strictly enforced until around the depression era when doctors became more lenient for a time. The absolutely dismal economy and financial hardships faced by most made them finally realize why a woman might not want another child, another mouth to feed, and so they would often perform abortions during the 20s and 30s off the books and without consequence. But after World War II, when things got better financially, it swung back in the direction of absolutely no abortions. This is the age of the nuclear family. When women were expected to be in the home having babies. This is when the baby boomers were born. This is why there are so many of them. And doctors were being prosecuted again at this point for performing abortions. Which of course, didn’t put an end to abortions, it just drove the practice underground into less capable hands. According to Annalies Winney writing for Johns Hopkins University quote “In the 1950s and 1960s, up to 1.2 million illegal abortions were performed each year in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute. In 1965, 17% of reported deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth were associated with illegal abortion,” end quote. 

A rubella outbreak in the mid sixties swung the abortion pendulum back a little bit in the other direction. Rubella during pregnancy can cause severe birth defects and so, in some cases, abortions were performed to end those pregnancies. And then of course in 1973 we have the Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade which made abortion a constitutional right. But of course, that was overturned in June of 2022, leaving the legality of abortion up to individual states. And so you can see how this pendulum has swung back and forth for much of the last two centuries. According to Katie Hunt writing for CNN quote “Abortion opponents portray the rights granted by Roe v. Wade and legal access to abortion as an historical aberration… which is not accurate, historians say,” end quote. In reality, Roe vs. Wade was a return to the way things had mostly always been before the newly formed male dominated medical field rose up and pushed out female physicians and midwives in the mid 1800s. I don’t think many people realize that, that it was never really about protecting life, protecting unborn babies. Mary Fissell, professor of history and medicine at Johns Hopkins University says quote “This whole innocent unborn life that is the language of the American right today, that’s only (in recent) decades. Sometimes abortion was something people didn’t like because it pointed to illicit sex. Women have always terminated pregnancies, for as far back in the historical record we can see. I think the long view is really important. Things were not always as they are today,” end quote. 

Are concerns about ending the lives of unborn babies valid? Of course they are. Especially after we started using sonograms in the second half of the 20th century where you can see those tiny hearts beating. Of course those concerns are valid. And that’s why abortion is such a fundamentally complicated ethical conundrum today. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that the controversy did not start that way. Throughout time, whenever issues arose about contraceptives and abortion, it was always based on concerns about the behavior of women. That access to contraceptives and abortions would enable women to have extramarital affairs. That it would allow sex workers, prostitutes to flourish. That it would lead to population problems and challenges to the status quo where wealthy women had fewer children and poor women had more children. That it was empowering women to practice medicine as midwives and physicians, performing medical procedures, in a field where they were not at all welcome. These have always been the reasons. And if you know this, if you know this context, I think it helps to understand where pro-choice people are coming from a little bit. Right? The fact that it has always been men making decisions about abortion, about whether or not it’s legal, about whether or not it’s ethical. Men, who, for most of history, had nothing at all to do with abortions just like they had nothing at all to do with childbirth. Men who had ulterior motives for wanting to do away with abortion, who wanted women to have consequences for their actions in ways that men never have. Who cares if a man is sexually promiscuous? Who cares if he cheats on his wife? There are no consequences for that. But for women, there were consequences. And men relied on those consequences to keep women in check. The double standard, as I have said many times before, is infuriating. And while yes there are valid reasons to oppose abortion, valid reasons to dislike people like Madame Restell, the whole controversy is muddied by the way it’s been weaponized by men against women. And without the history, if you’re just looking at it through today’s lens, it’s hard to see that. It’s all about life now, pro-life, saving lives. Everyone can get on board with saving lives, saving babies, of course. But the real reason abortion is so controversial is that it’s unfortunately not just about saving lives. It’s also about male dominance and the oppression of women throughout time. And it’s only through an understanding of the past, knowledge of stories like Ann Lohman, Madame Restell, who bled out in her bathtub with a butcher knife in her hand, that we get to see that part of it, that we get to factor that in as we stack the scales in the ongoing search for answers to the ethical conundrum that is abortion. 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from Smithsonian Magazine, Johns Hopkins University, Science History Institute, the New York Historical Society, and CNN. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.