April 26, 2007
Abortion, in the Nineteenth Century and Today Posted by Ellen Feldman at 05:50 PM EST I followed with fascination last week’s debate in the wake of the Supreme Court ban on intact dilation and extraction abortions, and while I agree with Josh Zeitz’s arguments, I concede that John Steele Gordon was right about advertisements for female remedies. Warnings that women should not take the product if pregnant because it was sure to produce miscarriage, a common disclaimer in nineteenth-century ads, were intended as not-so-subtle guarantees that the product was an abortifacient. By midcentury such products had become big business in America. During a single week in 1845, the Boston Daily Times advertised Madame Restell’s Female Pill, Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills, Dr. Monroe’s French Periodical Pills, and Dr. Melveau’s Portuguese Female Pills. In addition to disingenuous warnings against taking the cure if pregnant, code words were also common. “Portuguese” pills signified an abortifacient while “French letter” or “French remedy” usually meant a contraceptive device, which was also illegal. Despite the glossy ads, commercial abortifacients were as ineffectual and dangerous as the widespread homemade brews. But the high price—some Portuguese pills sold for five dollars a box—lured many retailers and even reputable pharmaceutical firms into the trade. By midcentury, surgical abortion had also become commercialized and highly visible. The Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City, a lurid 1870 account by the pseudonymous George Ellington, deplored the many female abortionists in the city, most of the “poorer class” and “of foreign birth or extraction,” as well as the tonier “doctor” abortionists, who ran private hospitals and whose knowledge of family skeletons sometimes gave them entrée into the best society. Given the number and variety of practitioners, it was no wonder that abortions could be procured for as much as five hundred dollars or as little as five. “The luxury of an abortion is now within the reach of the serving girl,” wrote one male moralist with a peculiar conception of the good life. By the 1840s, abortions had become common not only for unwed girls “in trouble” but among married women, and not just any married women but white, Protestant, native-born married women of the middle and upper classes. While many husbands were accomplices, even instigators, other white, Protestant, native-born men were outraged. Immigration was on the rise. Catholics were not only taking up residence, they were producing broods of offspring, while native-born women were committing “racial” suicide. One group of men also had a vested interest, and therein lies the story of the first abortion revolution that criminalized the procedure in America. As late as 1800, not a single jurisdiction in the United States had a statute on abortion. By 1900 every state in the Union had an antiabortion law except Kentucky, where state courts managed to criminalize it in practice. More than any other segment of nineteenth-century America, including the clergy, who remained remarkably silent on the subject, regular physicians were responsible for the change. The term “regular physicians” is difficult to define. In 1846 a group seeking to characterize what they were could list only what they were not, a spectrum of specialties ranging from homeopaths to clairvoyants. The phrase generally referred to practitioners who subscribed to the principles of what later became scientific medicine and had some training in the nation’s better medical schools, as opposed to for-profit diploma mills. In an era when anyone who claimed to heal could hang out a shingle, and doctors were often seen as menaces to society, regular physicians had to find a way to distinguish themselves from the hordes of uneducated quacks and self-promoting snake oil salesmen. And since many of the latter had practices devoted, if not limited, to abortion, one of the first and most lucrative specialties in American medical history, the solution was obvious. By prohibiting abortion, regular physicians would, in a single stroke, promote their professional standing, protect their incomes, and encourage the practice of good medicine. The last was not a mere afterthought. Regular physicians were frequently summoned to try to save women who had been maimed and butchered by incompetent practitioners. The irony is that a century later physicians spearheaded a second and reverse revolution. In the mid-1960s, when several California doctors performed therapeutic abortions on women who had been exposed to rubella, a disease that can cause severe birth defects in babies, a Catholic physician on the State Medical Board committed what had been until then an unthinkable breech of medical etiquette and ethics. He brought charges against them. A few years later, Dr. Jane Hodgson, who terminated the pregnancy of another mother who had contracted German measles, became the first physician in American history to be tried and convicted for performing a therapeutic abortion in a hospital. By demanding clarification of the law and a statute that would protect them, which California passed in 1967, physicians helped set in motion America’s second abortion revolution. In view of last week’s ruling, a third revolution may be in the making. If the courts continue to limit access to abortion, and women are forced to turn to back-alley quacks, will reputable physicians step forward again?
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