Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [147]
Abortion and Infanticide
In the last half of the nineteenth century, there were dramatic changes in the laws relating to abortion.76 Before 1860, some states did not regulate abortion at all. In 1821, Connecticut made it a crime to administer “any deadly poison, or other noxious and destructive substance, with an intention . . . to murder, or thereby to cause or procure the miscarriage of any woman, then being quick with child.”77 This was essentially a murder statute; moreover, it applied only to the period after quickening —the time when the mother feels the baby stirring inside her. New York’s statute of 1827 went further; here it was a crime to “wilfully administer to any pregnant woman any medicine, drug, substance or thing whatever, or . . . use or employ any instrument” to “procure the miscarriage of any such woman,” except “to preserve the life of such woman” or if “advised by two physicians to be necessary for that purpose.”78
Between 1840 and 1880, the number of abortions apparently increased. Women eagerly bought Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills, Dr. Monroe’s French Periodical Pills, and countless other nostrums, which supposedly would get rid of an unwanted fetus. This was the period of the great, famous, rich abortionists—most notably “Madame Restell” (Ann Lohman), whom we have already met. Madame Restell sold “female monthly pills” to induce miscarriage and spent a fortune discreetly advertising her wares and services. She kept in her employ a force of salesmen who peddled her pills. Her establishment was the height of luxury. There were many of these private “female” clinics. George Ellington, writing in 1869, describes one house on New York’s Fifth Avenue as “magnificently furnished”; five floors of statues, paintings, rare bronzes, objets d’art, all “chosen with unexceptionable taste.” In this house, women engaged rooms “at enormous rates.” Here, of course, the customers were not poor women; they were pregnant women from middle- and upper-class society.79
Abortion laws after 1860 were broader and more drastic. Between 1860 and 1880, states passed more than forty antiabortion laws. Over a dozen states banned abortion for the first time; others tightened their existing legislation. Organized medicine led the crusade against abortion. 80 There were a number of reasons for their zeal. One was certainly professional, connected to a general campaign against “quacks.” The new abortion laws put power in the hands of doctors. Doctors fought hard to medicalize childbirth. They aimed to drive abortionists (many of them women), midwives, and other rivals out of business.
But there were probably deeper social reasons for the campaign against abortion. Many women who wanted abortions were married. This was, to some observers, a most alarming fact. A woman’s highest duty was to bear children, not to snuff out their lives. When middle-class white women killed the life they were carrying, they were not only perverting their own natures and denying their God-given role, they were also helping America commit racial and genetic suicide. Marriage, as one clergyman put it rather hysterically, had not been instituted so that “the husband may live in legal fornication and the wife in legal prostitution”; marriage was, instead, a baby-making machine, and by express “command of the Bible.”81 Charles Sutton, warden of the Tombs, wrote in 1874 that “It is no longer the mode to bear children—they are out of style, like last season’s bonnet. At least it is getting to be so among the butterfly people of the world—those who prefer to look at life as if it were an immense carnival.” Only the “lower classes” still wanted to “hear the sweet lullaby sung.”82 James Whitmire, in an 1874 article on “Criminal Abortion,” blamed abortion for the fact that there were so few “native-born