Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [645]
Mme. Restell was the public persona of Ann Lohman, an English immigrant seamstress who had married Charles Lohman, a printer at Bennett’s Herald and an avowed admirer of Robert Dale Owen’s writings on birth control. Charles and Ann set to producing preventive pills and powders—not placebos but potent drugs. If they didn’t work, as they often didn’t, Mme. Restell offered more extensive services along with “private and respectable board.” For an income-adjusted fee (twenty dollars for the poor, a hundred for the wealthy), she would use instruments to pierce the amniotic sac and induce a miscarriage, at which point the woman would go for further treatment to her regular doctor.
Restell was a spectacular success, especially with the carriage trade. Soon she had six pill outlets in the city, an enlarged Greenwich Street lying-in facility for aborting a fetus or bearing a child, branch agencies in Newark, Philadelphia, and Boston, and salesmen on the road marketing her abortifacients and making referrals to the New York clinic. Rivals set up shop, including a Madame Costello, who also pretended to a Parisian background, and a Mrs. W. H. Maxwell, whose clinic on Greene Street offered abortions, treatment for venereal disease, and a “sanctuary to which to flee” for the unfortunate.
Commercialization afforded new ease of access for women seeking abortions, but it also brought their changing sexual habits forcibly to public attention. Before 1840 there had been virtually no mention of abortion in the popular press. Now one George W. Dixon, owner and editor of a weekly named the New York Polynathos, started a campaign to expose Restell as a malefactor. Dixon, a self-appointed scourge of lax public morals, was less concerned with the life of the fetus or health of the mother than with the presumed threat to female virtue. Spouses could now commit adultery without detection, Dixon warned. Worse, a man about to wed a professed maiden could well discover that “Madame Restell’s Preventive Powders have counterfeited the hand writing of Nature; you have not a medal, fresh from the mint, of sure metal; but a base, lacquered counter, that has undergone the sweaty contamination of a hundred palms.”
In 1841 a carman with the Harlem Rail Road claimed his dying wife had accused Restell of a botched abortion. Restell was arrested, accused of murder, and confined to the Tombs. In the end, however, she was convicted of only two minor infractions, and the publicity garnered her additional business. She was indicted again in 1844; though none of her wealthy clients dared defend her in public, Restell boldly argued her own case in letters to the public press and again got off without serious penalty.
As she grew wealthier Restell took a certain delight in her notoriety. She rode daily along Broadway in a showy carriage with four superb horses and a liveried coachman, brushing aside press depictions of her as a “she devil.” But now Restelle came up against more powerful enemies. Medical doctors had been arguing that a fetus was alive from the point of conception, not the moment of quickening. Abortions were therefore immoral at any stage and should be recategorized as murder and outlawed. Doctors also claimed abortions were dangerous (and there were incompetent and avaricious practitioners, though the operation remained far less hazardous than childbirth). Physicians backed Dixon’s charge that abortion fostered sexual license among females; “Madame Restell,” one doctor claimed, “offered to those who would not control their appetites, impunity.” Doctors neglected