The ‘Wickedest Woman in New York’ who made abortion affordable for women in the 1800s
The demise of NYC’s most famous women’s ‘doctor’
When it comes to fertility matters, women have always turned to each other for both emotional and practical help. For centuries, women with little or no formal medical training have traded folk wisdom about menstruation, birth control, pregnancy, and abortion, dispensed herbal remedies, and even performed surgical procedures. Sometimes they’ve done so under threat of death; in other times and places, it was entirely legal.
If you needed to terminate a pregnancy in New York City during the first half of the 19th century, you might pay a visit to a woman named Madame Restell. Perhaps the most famous abortionist of her time, Restell was as early as 1840 placing politely redacted ads for $1 pills in New York City newspapers:
“FEMALE PILLS. — MRS. RESTELL, Female Physician, informs the ladies that her pills are an infallible regulator of ******. They must not be used when ********. Prepared and sold only by herself.” New York Sun, December 29, 1840
The missing words, of course, were “menses” and “pregnant.” And the pills were but one of Restell’s offerings. Advertising herself as a “female physician” in spite of a total lack of medical education, Madame Restell also sold “preventative powders” (birth control), and performed surgical abortions, often on women who’d tried the pills first, but remained pregnant. (Most herbal abortifacients are unreliable). In addition, she ran a boarding house for pregnant women who wanted to carry to term in anonymity. She facilitated the babies’ adoptions for an additional fee.
At the time, abortion was legal, and ads like the ones Restell ran in the penny press were the primary way that women learned about resources available to end unwanted pregnancies. To be sure, the ads were deliberately euphemistic so as not to offend readers’ sensibilities. But the language of “regulating” the menses was simply the way “abortion” was thought of.
For most of Western history, pregnancy before “quickening” (the point when a woman can feel her fetus moving, usually around 4 or 5 months) was thought of more “in terms of a lack of something (menstruation) rather than the presence of something (a fetus),” historian Anna M. Peterson writes.
Until 1867, abortion before quickening was legal in the US. And the practice was widespread. Surgical abortions were rare. Instead, doctors, midwives, and homeopaths offered women combinations of herbs like pennyroyal, savin, tansy, blue cohosh, cedar oil, motherwort, and others. And most of the abortifacients sold to women were marketed simply as restorers or regulators of the monthly cycle.
Born Anne Trow in Painswick, England, Madame Restell came to New York in 1831 with her first husband and small daughter. After her husband died from yellow fever, Restell made a meager living as a seamstress. It wasn’t until she met her second husband, a German-Russian immigrant and newspaperman, that she took up “medicine.” By some accounts, her second husband, Charles Lohman, was also a “quack physician.” Together, the two sold medications—made by Ann’s brother, who worked in a pharmacy—for a host of ailments.
But women’s reproductive issues soon became Restell’s specialty. By 1840, her pills were being sold in six outlets throughout New York, and she maintained a robust mail-order business. Though she was frequently derided in the press for her supposed avarice, she implemented a sliding scale at her clinic on Greenwich Street — for a surgical abortion, she charged $20 for poor women, and $100 for the wealthy.
Clearly, women needed her services. But Restell’s success coincided with the criminalization of abortion. During the second half of the 19th century, Victorian morality pushed any frank talk about sex to the periphery of society. Restell was called the “Wickedest Woman in New York.” After one of her patients died, an anti-abortion advocate said Madame Restell had perpetrated “one of the most hellish acts ever perpetrated in a Christian land.”
At the same time, the medical establishment was seeking greater legitimacy and authority. Up to that point, American women had had a fair amount of power to make their own reproductive choices. But doctors were trying to professionalize, and they did so in part by undermining the knowledge of pregnant women as well as midwives and homeopaths.
The American Medical Association was founded in 1847, and only 10 years later launched one of its first big campaigns: the Committee on Criminal Abortion.
Religious leaders were debating definitions of fetal life at the time, and took the AMA’s views into account. Doctors and religious officials soon joined forces to call women’s experiences of quickening into question and to criminalize abortion. In 1869, Pope Pius IX declared that from the time of conception, an embryo was a human being with a soul. By 1900, Anna M. Peterson writes, “abortion had been culturally and politically redefined as the taking of a human life — an immoral and illegal act.”
Restell had earned “an unenviable notoriety in the Police Courts” by 1854, according to The New York Times. She made a living as an amateur obstetrician for 40 years, but was routinely harassed by police, arrested multiple times, and jailed for a year on Blackwell (now Roosevelt) Island. In much the same way members of the so-called “big abortion industry” are today painted as callous moneymakers by the “pro-life” movement, Restell was mocked in the press for being visibly well-to-do.
Incidentally, Madame Restell’s demise came in part at the hands of Anthony Comstock, the author of the fanatical, anti-obscenity Comstock Act and a representative of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Posing as a man seeking birth control for his wife, Comstock entrapped Restell.
Facing yet another round of criminal charges, the embattled Restell slit her own throat in 1878. Her servants told reporters she asked, “Why do they persecute me so? I’ve done nothing to harm anyone,” just before her suicide. The final note in her closed case filed read, “A bloody ending to a bloody life.”
