Abortion Is a Fundamentally American Act
By the middle of the 19th century, Ann Lohman was rich—the owner of furs and jewels, a woman who made her way through New York City in a carriage pulled by four horses. She built a brownstone on 5th Avenue; the Vanderbilts would later build three homes across the street. For a woman who’d once been a maid and seamstress, it was a remarkable turnabout of fortune. The source of her wealth? Under the name Madame Restell, Lohman worked as an abortion provider. Her job was no secret: She advertised her services in newspapers.
But Lohman practiced during a tumultuous moment in American history, amid the nation’s first major anti-abortion movement. It was a time that, like our own, found avenues to legal abortion narrowing and providers under attack. “There really is this outrage towards her,” said University of Illinois professor Leslie Reagan, the author of When Abortion Was a Crime. Restell was “pursued,” Reagan said, and arrested more than once for providing abortions.
Part of what makes stories like Madame Restell’s so fascinating is that, just a few years before her reign as an infamous tabloid fixture, abortions were legal in New York and every other state. In fact, some form of abortion has been widely legal for much of American history, centuries before the 1973 Roe decision. Despite a raft of state laws between 1820 and 1880 criminalizing them, by the end of that century, doctors believed that 2 million abortions were being performed annually in the United States—which would have made the procedure far more commonplace than it is today.
The story of abortion in America is longer than the United States itself. It’s a story that includes centuries-old English laws permitting the practice, which colonizers brought with them to the US. It features founding father, Benjamin Franklin, who personally published an abortion recipe, and it’s the story of a time when even the Catholic Church permitted abortions. It’s a story that suggests, you could say, that abortion is a foundational American act.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/abortion-is-a-fundamentally-american-act/ar-AAZbtHZ
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