It is hard to find an anti-choicer today who will acknowledge that when abortion was illegal it was a widespread practice. That’s just pro-choice propaganda, we’re told: laws matter—and besides, people were more moral back then. Ha! Considering that in 1800 the American fertility rate was seven children per woman, and by 1900 it was less than four, it is hard to see how else that decline could have happened, given the primitive nature of nineteenth-century birth control and the popularity of sex. In fact, as James Mohr, Leslie Reagan, Linda Gordon and other historians have established, abortion was extremely common in the nineteenth century, especially among married, middle- and upper-class white women, who resorted to abortion when they’d had all the children they could handle or their bodies could bear. Abortifacients with euphemistic names like Uterine Regulator and The Samaritan’s Gift for Females were advertised in newspapers, sold in drug stores and available through the mail. In most states, ending a pregnancy was more or less legal before quickening—the moment when the pregnant woman feels the fetus move, usually in the fourth or fifth month—until after the Civil War. New York State was an exception: there, abortion, unless deemed necessary to save a woman’s life, was outlawed in 1828. In 1845, it was made a crime to even seek one. But these laws were widely ignored. In the 1870s, The New York Times estimated that 200 abortionists were practicing full time in the city.

More: The Notorious Life of a Nineteenth-Century Abortionist