What we talk about when we talk about abortion
Anti-abortion rhetoric has centered on “keeping women safe” for 150 years
“The cry of our hearts is that babies will be saved, and women will be held back in Jesus’ name from making a decision they can never unmake.” So said Tina Whittington, director of Students for Life, on February 29. She was speaking to the Christian anti-abortion prayer coalition Bound4Life on one of a series of hour-long spiritual conference calls. The “cry of [her] heart” was directed toward the Supreme Court.
This week the court heard its first abortion case in a decade, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. The eight justices considered arguments for and against a 2013 Texas state law that requires clinics to comply with a range of architectural specifications and doctors who perform abortions to get admitting privileges to nearby hospitals.
Getting formal hospital clearance is difficult, and making structural changes to clinics is often prohibitively expensive. Since the law was passed, the number of abortion clinics in Texas has gone from 41 to 19.
Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt could have enormous consequences for women nationwide. Reproductive rights advocates say that the law effectively bars women from accessing abortion services to which they have a legal right. The anti-abortion website LifeNews says, “this case will impact every state in the nation — affecting whether pro-life policies protecting women’s health will expand, or whether they will contract.”
Those with a religious objection to abortion claim they want to see women spared emotional anguish. In Tina Whittington’s words, they want to “save women from the pain of losing their child through abortion.”
Other anti-abortion proponents of the Texas law say that adjustments to abortion clinics are essential to women’s physical health and safety. In an op-ed for LifeNews, Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) says the law simply “requires abortion clinics to comply with the same standards set for other outpatient surgery centers.” The “big abortion industry,” she says, is acting like this amounts to a “complete ban on abortion,” using hyperbole “to quash even the most basic protections for mothers and their babies.”
Anti-abortion activists see women as victims, either of their own misguided desperation or of “shady” doctors. Paradoxically, they often cite this desire to “protect women” as their primary reason for closing women’s health clinics. When did “protecting women” become a proxy for criminalizing abortion?
Quite a long time ago, it turns out.
For most of Western history, pregnancy before “quickening” (the point when a woman can feel her fetus moving) was thought of more “in terms of a lack of something (menstruation) rather than the presence of something (a fetus),” 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 and others. Most of the abortifacients sold to women were marketed simply as restorers or regulators of the monthly cycle.
As early as 1840, Madame Restell, perhaps the most famous abortionist of the 19th century, was 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.”
Restell was not a physician. (Nor was Restell her real name.) But by 1840 her pills were being sold in six outlets throughout New York. Though she and her husband ultimately opened a proper clinic on Greenwich Street, she maintained a robust mail-order business.
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. In 1857, a 27-year-old physician and member, Horatio Storer, 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 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 “big abortion industry” are painted as callous moneymakers, Restell was mocked in the press for being visibly well-to-do.
Facing yet another round of criminal charges, 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.”
As for the women who’d used Restell’s services, they were routinely depicted as victims: of their own ignorance, of predatory men, or of greedy, amoral abortionists. This New York Times article from 1854 chronicles the “ruin” of a young girl who sought an abortion:
The “pro-life” movement we know today got its start in the 1960s, but its roots in both medical and religious paternalism stretch much farther back.
