Scarlet Letters: Getting the History of Abortion and Contraception Right
The Puritans brought their laws on abortion from merry old England, where the procedure was also legal until quickening. Although the Puritans changed much of England’s legal system when they established their “city upon a hill,” they kept abortion as a part of Puritan family life, allowing women to choose when and if they would become mothers—whether for the first time or the fifth time.
Colonial women procured prequickening abortions mainly with the help of other women in their communities; skilled midwives knew which herbs could cause a woman to abort, and early American medical books even gave instructions for “suppressing the courses,” or inducing an abortion. Much of what we know about abortion in 18th-century America comes from the case of Sarah Grosvenor, a young woman who died from a late-term surgical abortion in Connecticut in 1742. Surgical abortions were rare and dangerous; most abortions in this period were induced by herbal abortifacients. Sarah’s case entered the legal record after the doctor who performed her abortion was brought to court for murdering the young woman and her unborn child—the abortion was illegal since it took place after quickening. Cornelia Hughes Dayton, however, an early American historian who has researched the case extensively, points out that when Sarah first tried to abort her child by “taking the trade”—ingesting herbal abortifacients—the women of her community were not surprised by her actions. They were familiar with abortion and were not troubled by its ethical implications.…
During the mid-19th century, American physicians also began to battle “irregular” doctors, such as homeopaths and midwives, in an attempt to assert the authority and legitimacy of male-dominated scientific medicine. To tackle these irregular doctors, the “scientific” physicians attacked legal abortion because it was midwives and other “unscientific” medical practitioners who safely performed the procedure. White men were also concerned by shifting ethnic and racial dynamics in the United States, worrying that the low birthrate of the white upper class would lead to racial inferiors and un-American immigrants overrunning the country.
Together, a coalition of male doctors backed by the American Medical Association, the Catholic Church, and sensationalist newspapers began to campaign for the criminalization of abortion. By the turn of the century, this coalition had largely succeeded in limiting women’s medical choices. According to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in her book Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, restricting abortion was one way that male physicians could “assert clear authority” over their female patients. The Victorian anti-abortion movement portrayed women who terminated their pregnancies as unnatural and selfish, undermining the expected, patriotic, and godly role of the American woman—that of wife and mother.
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