Abortion: An American Tradition

We need more of this to reinforce that abortion is as American as anything else we hold dear, not some newfangled evil coming from the libs.

In the late spring of 1839 in New York City, a nineteen-year-old, white working-class woman named Ann Maria Purdy confided an intimate secret to Rebecca Cromer, her Black laundress: she was pregnant, and worried that her state would prevent her from nursing her ten-month-old son. The washerwoman was sympathetic, and gestured toward a newspaper where a woman named Mrs. Restell published advertisements for “remedies” that could prevent pregnancy. Cromer knew women who had consulted Restell to terminate their pregnancies, too.[1] Purdy would go on to pay Restell for an abortion, and her case would result in the first great abortion trial in New York City in 1841. Purdy was, however, far from exceptional as a client. Lucinda Van Buskirk, a friend whom Purdy brought with her to Restell’s office, testified that she saw three women and two men in Restell’s office.[2] In the same year, another woman named Hester Wells accompanied a friend seeking an abortion to Restell’s, and later reported that she saw multiple women in the waiting room. The women’s testimonies implied that Restell operated a lucrative business, suggesting that abortion was common among women in early nineteenth-century New York City.

These examples show how abortion is a deeply embedded part of United States history, so long as you consider women to be part of the nation. As a historian interested in the narratives of women like those mentioned above, I paused when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito argued in his decision for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that a right to abortion is not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Alito recounted that abortion “had long been a crime in every single State” until Roe because “a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions.” While an enshrined right to abortion may have been contested in American legal history (the nineteenth-century restrictions to which Alito referred were, in fact, legal innovations at the time they were passed), an unyielding tradition of abortion becomes clear when one looks at the women who comprise “the nation.” Alito’s insistence on the right to abortion looks only at legal precedents established by white men in power, not the experiences of women. Centering women’s lived experiences challenges Alito’s definitions of history, tradition, and the “nation,” revealing an America in which the practice of abortion is not only deeply rooted, but often beneficial.

Alito’s decision cited legal sources demonstrating that abortion was not totally criminalized in early America.[3] American law followed British common law, which criminalized abortion once the child was “quick,” or endowed with life. The mother determined when the fetus entered this stage of development, as it was defined as the moment she felt the fetus move in the womb.[4] Women in colonial and early republican America terminated their pregnancies using a variety of means, including ingesting herbal abortifacients like tansy or ergot; physical exertion, such as riding horses or even jumping from heights; and surgical techniques that dilated the cervix and entered the uterus. Women might attempt to induce miscarriages on their own bodies, or consult a practitioner like an apothecary or a physician for herbal or mechanical assistance.[5] In her foundational work, Cornelia Hughes Dayton has shown that early Americans developed a colloquial vocabulary for abortion, such as the phrase “taking the trade.”[6] Historians of free, urban women in the North have found that abortion became increasingly visible, accessible, and “commercial” in the 1830s and 1840s, with practitioners like Restell operating successful businesses. Abortion was a normal, if private, part of early American women’s reproductive lives.

Legal and journalistic evidence from the nineteenth century reveals intimate details about women’s needs for abortion. For example, Mary Ann Cuddy died in 1853 from overdosing on oil of tansy, an herb with known abortifacient properties, after her husband abandoned her and their “two or three children” for California. She was left, according to the New York Herald, “unprovided for” and “in destitute circumstances.”[7] Cuddy had little financial recourse once her husband fled to the western frontier, leaving her unable to support another child. Abortion was a practical solution that allowed her to support the family she already had. A case ten years later shows how married women, too, saw abortion as a need. Charles Robertson testified that his wife, a British immigrant named Letitia, had attempted multiple abortions throughout her lifetime, and two months prior to her death suspected she was pregnant again. She “seemed almost crazy at the idea, and commenced taking medicine to bring on abortion.”[8] These stories show a few of the reasons that abortion was important for women. Controlling their reproduction allowed them to navigate the constraints of patriarchal social systems and survive in a world without reliable contraception. Cuddy and Robertson are examples of women who may have felt desperate in their circumstances, but exercised their agency by controlling whether or not they were pregnant.

Whole thing is outstanding and a good reminder why we have historians who tell stories in way everyday people can understand, which so few other academic disciplines value (cough poli sci).