What an Abortion Felt Like in 1907


State legislatures in their unceasing battle to restrict a woman’s right to bodily autonomy would have you think that abortion has been a radical and rare practice in American history, ushered in with Roe v. Wade in 1973. Nothing could be further from the truth. As historians of abortion have established definitively, abortion was not only widely practiced in America in previous centuries — it was for much of that period not regarded as a crime. A sin, maybe, but not a crime. Indeed as Leslie J. Regean tells us, abortion remained common even as its criminalization increased midway through the 19th century.
Although the copious legislation restricting women’s rights to determine their own reproduction throughout history is widely available, very few first person accounts of abortion from the point of view of the woman experiencing it a century ago and earlier have survived. It takes some kind of woman to record a painful, stigmatized, and increasingly illegal procedure. It takes even an another kind of woman, a woman of extraordinary voice and power, to write their boyfriend a letter about their abortion while they are experiencing it. But Nora May French, poet and veteran of two abortions did just that, leaving us a document that speaks volumes as to the need of women, then as now, to determine their own reproduction without fear of punishment or risk of death.
Raised initially in privilege in Aurora, NY — a town her grand uncle Henry Wells (founder of Wells Fargo and American Express) as good as owned — Nora May French moved West and became the darling of the Bohemian literary set of California. She was a celebrated poet in her day. She had won writing competitions since the age of twelve, and had been published in major literary journals since the age of seventeen. In 1907 when she was 27, her “Diary of a Telephone Girl” (based on her own experience as a phone operator in San Francisco) was featured as the lead article in the Saturday Evening Post — circulation then one million a week. Two weeks after the article’s publication, the newspapers coast to coast reported her suicide by cyanide poisoning in the arts colony of Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Unmentioned in these reports, of course, were her two abortions, both the result of pregnancies to married men. Her first, at the age of 23, was at the hands of a physician in a Los Angeles hospital. Though technically illegal, loopholes abounded for doctors to make “therapeutic exceptions” for their patients. Nora’s then boyfriend, Captain Alan Hiley, a man of wealth and influence, could easily have secured a physician to perform the operation on his mistress.
Nora experienced the procedure itself as a surreal horror, the doctor’s cold, pointed, metal tools memorably contrasting with the soft warmth of the fetus. Awake during the abortion to see the aftermath, she wrote a poem about it entitled “Vivisection”:
We saw unpitying skill
In curious hands put living flesh apart,
Till, bare and terrible, the tiny heart
Pulsed, and was still.”
“Vivisection” was not published during her lifetime, but posthumously by the man who made her pregnant the second time.
Nora May French’s second abortion, circa 1907, was self-administered with drugs she procured herself. She acted at the earliest possible moment she felt herself to be pregnant, hoping to avoid the surgical experience of her first abortion. She had become pregnant by Harry Anderson Lafler, one of the Bohemian poets who gathered in San Francisco’s famed Coppa’s Restaurant, a notorious rake in the literary set. Nora was then living with her sister Helen in a bungalow Lafler had built for them in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of post-earthquake San Francisco. Her sister’s horror at her first abortion (and constant disapproval of Nora’s sex life) played the decisive role in Nora’s choosing to terminate her second pregnancy.
Although the Comstock Law of 1873 had forbidden the overt advertisement of abortofacients, there were any number of drugs advertised in the papers that would do the job, described in a way no one would mistake: Dr. Conte’s Female Pills, Dr. Thomas’ Pennyroyal Pills, Dr. Trousseau’s Celebrated Female Cure were just a few of the offerings billed cannily as bringing on “suppressed menstruation,” or “regulation,” or “cure.” Brands like Chichester’s English Penny Royal Pills, sold in small metallic boxes of red and gold, were sold by druggists as safe, devoid of dangerous substances and “always reliable.”
In truth, these compounds were far from safe. Unregulated, they frequently contained undisclosed noxious chemicals such as turpentine. Even their advertised herbal ingredients, tansy and pennyroyal, risked a mother’s life. Symptoms of toxicity oil from pennyroyal, a form of mint, could begin with the desired abdominal pains but then progress to cardiovascular collapse, liver failure, and death. Tansy, with its deceptively benign yellow bloom, could induce convulsions and shortly dispatch mother along with her fetus.
Despite the risks, Nora returned from the druggist on a Friday night after work determined to take them immediately. Finding at her house a love letter from Lafler she hesitated, contemplating their possible future, but by morning her choice was clear. She swallowed the pills Saturday morning. All Saturday she waited but felt nothing, her anxiety increasing by the hour. By Sunday, the pains came, and she began to write:
Very dear, I have been through deep waters, and proved myself cowardly after all, for I bought some strenuous drugs Friday night, took them Saturday, and am suffering delayed and welcome pain today.
She was beyond conflicted. Much of the letter is her reasoning with the fetus; having bid it to depart, she told Lafler, she now wanted it to stay. But the strictures of society made a future for a single woman with a baby impossible.
Motherhood! What an unspeakably huge thing for all my fluttering butterflies to drown in. A still pool, holding the sky. I looked into it day after day, and sometimes I could see the sky, and sometimes only my drowned butterflies.
I’ve gone through every shade of emotion. I have accounted for my black humors to Bru and Helen with the simple that I had ’em and desired peace.
It was as if we were all walking together and my feet were struggling with some pulling quicksand under the grass. I would come near screaming very often. Dear, I would not shrink from the fact of the child, but I could not have endured the breaking with Helen, the strangeness, the terror, the tie upon us two it would have been. I cannot give that delay any other explanation. I am too healthy and normal. And you can’t think
And there the letter ends. A sheet or sheets missing, no doubt to shield the privacy of Harry Lafler, the letter’s recipient, and from whose hands the letter made its way to the archives of the Bancroft Library.
Catherine Prendergast, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, is a Guggenheim Fellow, contributor to McSweeneys, interviewed on NPR and in New York Magazine. She is currently writing a book related to the life of Nora May French. Representation: Anna Sproul-Latimer.
Quotes taken from the letter from Nora May French to Henry Anderson Lafler Papers (circa 1905–1907: BANC MSS C-H 38) available at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.