Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [646]
Physicians set out to persuade the state legislature to criminalize the procedure and eradicate New York City’s burgeoning reputation as the nation’s abortion capital. Dr. Gunning S. Bedford, professor of midwifery and diseases of women and children at the University of New York, led the attack. He and his colleagues had substantial influence, and the combination of medical pressure and sensational publicity won passage of a new abortion law in May 1845. It declared the death of a fetus or its mother to be second-degree manslaughter if quickening had taken place, a crime punishable by four to seven years in the state prison. It also made the mother herself liable for seeking and submitting to an abortion or for performing one on herself—an unprecedented revocation of women’s common-law immunity from punishment.
Madame Restell demonized in the Police Gazette, March 13, 1847. She is shown holding a bat with a dead baby in its jaws. (American Antiquarian Society)
With law in hand, press and physicians stepped up their assaults. The new National Police Gazette denounced abortionists as murderers and alleged they ran a lucrative side business selling their victims’ bodies to surgical clinics. Dixon, Restell’s old nemesis, incited the public to force her from the city, and in February 1846 a crowd of several hundred descended on her Greenwich Street quarters, yelling, “Where’s the thousand children murdered in this house?” and “Hanging’s too good for the monster!” Forty policemen, commanded by Chief Matsell, prevented mayhem, but city authorities proceeded to station men outside her office who followed callers home and noted down names and addresses.
In 1847 Restell was arrested again, indicted for manslaughter in the second degree, and tried before a crowded courtroom that included numerous lawyers from other states, among them Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Dr. Bedford was a leading prosecution witness at this first highly publicized abortion trial in U.S. history. Restell was found guilty, though only of a misdemeanor, and to the applause of spectators, she was sentenced to a year on Blackwell’s Island. It seemed a decisive victory for antiabortion forces.
It wasn’t. Restell did easy time—a featherbed instead of the usual straw mattress, food from the keeper’s table—and after she was freed, in June 1849, promptly resumed her advertisements and practice. More remarkably, throughout the 1850s the authorities and general populace alike virtually ceased hostilities against her and her competitors. Some attributed this to behind-the-scenes support from a combination of influential gentleman-patrons and to politicians and policemen won over by campaign contributions and bribes. Restell was certainly wealthy enough to afford payoffs. In spring 1857 she and her husband bought the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street—outbidding Archbishop Hughes, who had wanted to build an official residence there—and began erecting a mansion. Now, to the prelate’s dismay, the future St. Patrick’s Cathedral would have the city’s foremost abortionist as its neighbor.
Abortion thus remained in place as a leading option for women seeking birth control. But if the women who used such services were relieved, the feminists crusading against prostitution were not. Like Dixon, they feared its regularization would facilitate adultery (though they feared husbands would be the errant parties). Indeed in 1847 the American Female Moral Reform Society had rejoiced at the arrest of Mme. Restell, the “mistress of abominations,” and visited the “heroine of licentiousness” in her cell to encourage her to Christian contrition—with singular lack of success.
So female reformers turned to promoting alternatives to abortion, though once again their initiatives were hampered by religious and class convictions. New York City lacked a lying-in hospital where unwed mothers could bear illegitimate children