The Anti-Vice Crusade
Brooke Lansing on an ethics of empathy, 19th Century NYC, and the female abortionist.
When the Supreme Court’s Roe ruling was leaked, and then delivered for real, the citing of “deeply rooted history” from Justice Alito stood out. It was particularly curious because it’s odd to suggest we can trust our own history as being on the right side of history. There are plenty of obvious examples here.
Today we speak to Brooke Lansing about one particular history we’re interested in, the women’s history, and the origins of the anti-abortion activism that swallowed our highest court.
This interview was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
I’m Brooke Lansing. I'm a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University. I'm finishing my dissertation called, With the Strictest Confidence: Abortion and Contraception in 19th Century New York City.
I started my research with the question of how did women in this early 19th century period, before abortion was criminalized, experience getting an abortion or obtaining contraception. I just wanted to know their perspective; I think that women's stories are very important, and that was the driving force of my research.
My research expanded a little bit beyond that into actually uncovering the origins of anti-abortion activism in the United States. I came to that through comparing what women say, especially in court records, versus the account that gets published or talked about in a trial. There are often mismatches between what women say and what these public authorities say – and that contributes to how people perceive abortion.
Can you paint a picture of New York City in the early part of the 19th century – like, what are we dealing with? How are women interacting with family planning, contraception, and abortion?
There have been a lot of historians who have documented 19th century New York City as having a very active sex culture. There are a lot of brothels. It's very common for women to engage in prostitution. I guess, as a compliment to that, there were some abortion providers who start cropping up in the late 1830s and the 1840s. They start placing advertisements in newspapers. They were kind of coded; they would say things like, “I can help restore your menstruation”, or “I'll sell you pills that you're not supposed to take when pregnant.” Getting an abortion in these times is actually much less of the black and white issue it is today. There is a more fluid and more ambiguous understanding of the body. Women often just thought they were really trying to restore their periods. The medical field is also completely unregulated at this time, which is how people can advertise services to provide abortions or contraception without oversight of a medical regulatory body – there is none.
Are these ads specifically targeting women participating in sex work, or mothers, or both? We hear a lot about how the average person who receives an abortion is a parent already. Was this always the case?
One thing I would say is some of these advertisements are pulling from the earliest advocates for birth control in the Western World. There are a couple of doctors, including Charles Knowlton, who are really influential. He writes this moral tract called the Fruits of Philosophy. His argument for why reproductive control is moral is copied into advertising.
I have evidence that married women and unmarried women are the clients. A lot of the ads actually say, “to married ladies.” I think that use of the word marriage is really what keys people into the fact they are talking about sexual medicine. Talking about remedies that could be for people who are in sexual relationships. And I think it adds a degree of respectability to the medicine. They're not targeting prostitutes, at least in print. I think it's really a mix of both women who can't afford to have more children who are married, and those who are not.
Something that's very common is women who have been “seduced” will go to an abortion provider. What that means in this context is a man has promised to marry them, so they agree to start having a sexual relationship, the woman gets pregnant, and the man goes back on his promise and decides he no longer wants to marry the woman. There are a lot of those stories of women wanting to terminate a pregnancy after that, or the man freaking out and forcing the woman to terminate the pregnancy.
In Fruits Of Philosophy what moral argument is he making?
Well, he explicitly makes the argument that control of reproduction should be in the hands of women, and it shouldn't be in the hands of anyone else.
I get really consumed by the history of morality in the abortion conversation because it’s central to today’s debate. But morality wasn’t always a part of it.
I think the moral questions in the 19th century are very different than the moral questions that shape the abortion argument today. For example, I see very little concern for fetal life in the sources that I use. They're actually much more concerned that women are getting sexually taken advantage of, or that abortion providers are greedy. For example, the argument that really kicked off a vitriol against these abortion providers placing advertisements is that women can now deceive their husbands. Women could cheat on you, abort the child, and you'd never know. That thought seems to have been very powerful for the 19th century actors.
How are women describing their own experiences at this time?
One example is a woman named Ann Maria Purdy. She had an abortion in 1839, and she ends up dying in 1841. On her deathbed, she admits to her husband that she had had an abortion a few years before. She admits in her deposition before she dies that she already had a very young child, she was still breastfeeding him, and she just thought, “I can't really support another child.” She actually learns from a Black washer woman about a woman named Madame Restell, who became the most famous abortion provider in New York City, about how she can terminate a pregnancy.
Madame Restell’s defense twists Ann Maria’s story to make her out to be untrustworthy. They interrogate people who knew her and ask if they have ever seen her out with other men. They try to accuse her of being promiscuous, because if she's promiscuous, then you can't take her word for anything. You can't trust her word against this abortion provider. The crucial detail is that she is interested in preserving her body and her family, and that gets totally lost in the service of this narrative that she's untrustworthy, and sexually immoral.
How did this get brought into the courtroom?
When she told her husband, her husband brought the story to the police.
And his goal was to punish his wife or the provider?
The provider, because he thinks that she is sick as a result of the abortion, even though years have passed, and she actually has a doctor that says she's dying of tuberculosis. Again, people just ignore her to say, “Oh yeah, she's definitely dying from an abortion that happened over a year ago.”
How does this case end?
Restell was convicted, but she actually got the conviction overturned on a technicality about admissible evidence.
Once it’s overturned what becomes of Madame Restell?
Madame Restell became the most sought after abortion provider — both in terms of women wanting to be her client and police wanting to prosecute her. She was legally investigated and arrested several more times throughout her life and went to actual trial only one more time, where she was convicted and imprisoned for a year. She had a very lucrative career. She lived on Fifth Avenue, and became extremely wealthy and prominent as the Gilded Age emerged.
She is eventually persecuted by anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock. An anti-vice crusader is someone going after anything they consider obscene, which is abortion information, contraception, etc. He is committed to putting her away. He thinks she is corrupting the souls of New York City. He eventually gets her by pretending to be a man looking for contraception for his wife. She is arrested and supposed to show up in court again. But, she doesn't show up in court. Her maid found her in her bathtub. She slashed her own throat and killed herself.
I have so many questions.
I know.
First of all, to be clear, we’re talking about a white woman?
Yes, she’s a British immigrant.
When she went to prison for a year, what was the conviction?
At this time it is a misdemeanor for procuring an abortion. She would have had to serve one year in jail.
The Supreme Court has said that the right abortion is not deeply rooted in our nation's history and traditions. Do you think that is a misrepresentation of our nation’s history?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think his quote was, “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation's history and traditions.” I would say maybe a right to abortion, explicitly defined, isn't deeply rooted in legal documents. But, if you define the nation another way, if you look to the people who didn't have the opportunity to create legislation, namely, if you look at women, having abortions and obtaining contraception has always been a part of their traditions and their history.
This was actually very critical to enslaved women. They would try and terminate their pregnancies so that their future potential children did not have to be enslaved like them. So the question I would ask is, who are we defining the nation as? Does it just have to be the people in power or can it also be the people who were denied a lot of power?
Is there something in all of this research you wish more people knew about or understood?
The thing that I always come back to is an ethic of empathy. I don't know if empathy is considered enough to create a law on, but, to me, it's very important to empathize with women who want to end a pregnancy. It is important to ask what situation these women are in, and how one outcome or another is going to affect their lives, their mental health, and their ability to survive in this world.
That is a bit more of an emotional approach than a logical approach – but there are plenty of logical reasons as well. For example, when abortion became legal in New York in the 1970s, maternal mortality rates drastically dropped. But, again, I have read the stories of so many women who really believe that ending a pregnancy is what is going to help them best survive. It is about trusting that these women know what is best for themselves.
The ethics of empathy feels like what a religious perspective should be.
I will disclose that for me being pro-choice, to me, personally, it is a religious conviction. That's actually kind of how I got here. I disagreed with so many other Christians, and I wanted to make my own judgment on this. Having women suffer and having them deal with so much shame just felt so antithetical to every other ethic that I knew.
Oh wow. Another conversation I would love to have with you, but I want to respect your time today, thank you so much.