A Historical Perspective of the Current Abortion Debates

It's been a while since I last wrote an entry, as the school year has been whirling by with little regard for my need to explore the blogging world.  In the time since I last wrote there has of course been a political battle raging between President Obama and Mitt Romney, between the Republicans and the Democrats.  One of the most contentious platforms of both sides rests upon the concept of whether abortion should be legally available to American citizens.  On the right, many politicians argue that abortion should not be the choice of any woman, regardless of whether she is the victim of rape or incest.  And of course on the left, politicians argue that a woman should have the right to make her own choices about a body that belongs to her alone.  I am not using my blog as a place to make judgments about either party, but rather as a haven to simply explore the history of such highly debated topics.  How prevalent was abortion in American history?  Politicians have begun to name-drop the heavy weights of history such as the founding fathers, and attribute to them world views that they did not perhaps truly subscribe to.

All too often, people seem to believe that the current day is a time of incredible moral corruption and that there was at some point a golden past in which Americans restricted their lecherous behaviors.  It would be tempting to transfer this theory to the idea that abortion is a modern phenomenon as well.  Yet the historical records prove that this is not the case.  Individual colonial laws varied regarding legislation for abortion, but it was fairly impossible to convict a woman in colonies where it was outlawed, as it was difficult to obtain witnesses or to prove pregnancy.  There was also a huge void between the laws and public sentiment, as most people felt sorry for those women who were so desperate they had turned to abortion.

       In early America, colonies were forced to pass Bastardy Laws, as too many young single women were committing infanticide.  Because of the extreme regulation of sexuality by the church and the court system, some single, unmarried women turned to hiding their pregnancy and killing their child upon birth in order to prevent stigmatization by the community.  Some who didn't want the added economic responsibility of raising a child alone also chose to kill the baby upon birth, and then claimed that it had been still-born.  The Bastardy Laws insisted that midwives must be present in the birthing chamber to prevent such events.  In fact, they dictated that any single woman who gave birth to a child that then died during the process was assumed guilty of murder unless someone was there to witness the birth.

  One such story of infanticide involved  Elizabeth Shaw, a "weak, simple girl, deficient in mental capacity".  

Because her son was a bastard child, she snuck out to the nearby woods and hid him in the crevice of a rock, leaving him to die.  According to town lore, Shaw's own father turned her in to the authorities, and she was put on trial in 1745 and found guilty of murder. [1]  Several decades later a poem was penned immortalizing the sordid ordeal.

Those who attempted to self-abort in the colonial era risked losing their lives.  One early medial text written by a doctor claims that a young lady attempted a criminal abortion by a darning-needle.  When he arrived she had already expelled a fetus of 3 months, which had been wounded by the needle.  He could not remove the needle and it took two full days for the placenta to come out.  Eleven days later the girl had severe pain in her "inguinal region", and by the 35th day a mass had formed.  On the 79th day she expelled a six inches long needle from the swelling in the groin and managed to recover.[2]

       Yet founding fathers including Ben Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Jefferson did not condemn abortion.  In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson lauded Native America women who “have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable” in order to avoid the inconvenience of child birth.   While they did not approve of killing a child once it was born, they certainly understood the incentive for doing so prior to this time.  Certainly there were colonial influences that did not support such tactics.  For example, judge William Blackstone, an influential English legal writer abhorred the practice.  Clearly in the colonial era, no one consensus regarding the topic was accepted.

Yet by the early 19^th century, abortion became increasingly common.  Neither doctors, women nor judges condemned it as long as it was performed within the first few months.  According to the doctrine of quickening, life didn’t begin at conception but once the woman felt the fetus move within her (around 3-4 months).  Based on the research of John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman,  between 1800 and 1830 there was 1 abortion for every 25 to 30 live births.  By 1850 there was 1 abortion for every 5 to 6 live births.[3]  In comparison, in 2011 there were 19.6 abortions per 1,000 live births.[4] Despite the popularity of the practice in the Victorian era, it was a topic which very few women wrote about.  Those who aborted were typically both single and married Northern white women (both working and middle-class.  Both abortion and contraception remained unpopular in the southern United States, where a slightly different code of morals developed.  While there were exceptions made during wartime such as during the Civil War, in general Southern women were far more reticent to practice this method of birth control.  Black women in the south, particularly those who were enslaved, had little use for abortion as their society did not stigmatize pregnancy outside of marriage.

  Such advertisements were used as a way to alert the female population to abortaficient products being sold nearby without offending the "delicate sensibilities" of the Victorian era.

  The actual method of abortion for those who did practice it might be surprising, even scary to some in the modern day.  Native American healers and Anglo-American midwives prescribed roots or herbs, indigo, and a mixture of camomile and turpentine.  Women in the Midwest rubbed gunpowder on their breasts and drank rusty nail-water.  19^th century circulars advertised methods such as bleeding from the foot, hot baths, cathartics like camomile and aloes, jumping, exercising, and douching.  In addition to folk methods, surgical procedures like the use of a probe were available to women, although highly dangerous.  Doctors might perform abortions for between 10 and 100 dollars, but for only 8 dollars a woman could purchase a long silver probe with instructions to relieve her “female complaints”.  All too often these women punctured their vaginal wall and bled out.[5]

          Between 1860 and 1890, forty states enacted anti-abortion statutes, most rejected the doctrine of quickening, and placed limitations on advertisements.   But what had really changed in such a short span of time to induce such sweeping changes in public policy?  The charge to end the legality of abortion was led by doctors within the newly formed American Medical Association, and their motivations mingled both moral quandaries and their desire to establish the supremacy of physicians over midwives (who often helped women to perform these abortions).  These doctors joined forces with conservative politicians such as Anthony Comstock.  The Comstock Act in fact forbade the dissemination of any material that was deemed obscene, including information about birth control and abortion.  The result of the criminalization of abortion was that it was forced underground into the hands of quack doctors who endangered the lives of young women even further while charging them exorbitant prices.  Yet the fact that fertility rates continued falling in the early 20^th century proves that young women continued to practice both contraception and abortion.  They spread information through informal networks of female friends and family.

With the outlaw of abortion, thinly veiled advertisements for abortion such as this one could still be found in newspapers.  According to the ad, "Mrs. Becker" was a doctor of "obstetrics and female diseases".  Her notation that she ran a "pleasant home for ladies" implies she most likely performed abortions. (1926)

 

        In the years following the outlaw of abortion, women were targeted in raids on abortion clinics and forced to disclose their most personal secrets to the public.  According to the 1902 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, if a woman was suffering from complications of an illegal abortion, doctors refused to treat them until they confessed.  The practice of course had fatal results as in the late 1920’s 15,000 women a year died from abortions.  

Women continued to be prosecuted for their reproductive choices until the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade, when the legal system issued a ruling that women’s right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14^th amendment extended to their decision to have an abortion.  The Roe decision was amended to allow abortions only up to the time in which the fetus became “viable” (able to live outside the womb with artificial aid).  This usually corresponded to 28 weeks, but could occur at 24 weeks.    The reaction of the public to this decision was clearly divided into political camps.  Although the Roe decision has occasionally been threatened with being overturned (see Planned Parenthood v. Casey), the ruling has remained intact until the modern day.  In the meantime, some states have enacted “trigger laws” that would take effect if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, and would immediately outlaw the practice of abortion.  These include Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  On the other hand, states like California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, and Washington have already passed laws to maintain the legality of abortion should Roe v. Wade be overturned.

      While some mistakenly trace the abortion debate that continues today to the ruling of the court in Roe v. Wade, clearly Americans have had a long and tumultuous history of abortion regulation.  Those who are engaged in these culture wars would do well to become educated in American history as those desperate women in the earliest years of the colonies are clearly linked to female initiatives today.

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 For a more in depth look at the topic of the history of abortion in the U.S. see the phenomenal book: “When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1963” by Leslie J. Reagan

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[1] A Brief Relation of a Murder Committed by Elizabeth Shaw. London: [Timothy Green], 1772.

[2] To read the full text of the poem see, http://www.earlyamericancrime.com/poems/elizabeth-shaw.

[3][1] John D’ Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman “Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America" (Chapter 4)

[4][2] http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/01/10/abortion-rate-stalls-years-decline/

[5][3] For a visual representation, see the movie “Revolutionary Road” with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Lust in the One-Room House: Sex in Colonial America

Many Americans seem to regard the 21st century as a time of liberally minded sexual enlightenment.  However, were they to live through the colonial era, a time in which people were most often high on hemp and taverns outnumber churches, they might have a different opinion of both the past and the present.  In fact, they too might agree with Michel Foucault who argued against the Repressive Hypothesis of Sexuality.  In essence, Foucault claimed that the history of sexuality was not one of repression to liberation.  He argued that the idea that sexuality was repressed in Western society for much of the 17th-20th centuries is a mere illusion.  

The sex lives of ordinary colonial Americans are a testament to Foucault’s claims.  A fellow historian once wrote in their blog; "Yes, strange as it may seem, American society is much more sexually uptight than it was in the 18th century, the pornification of everything notwithstanding. Colonial Americans were a sexually open bunch — they cracked dirty jokes, they played sexual pranks, they sang outrageously ribald songs, they drew scandalous cartoons, and they masturbated in the churchyard when they thought the sermon was boring. They spied on each other through the cracks in the cabin walls, they had sex in haylofts, and they told everybody they knew when they got laid. There was no expectation of privacy. Even the Puritans, who are usually thought of as the world’s greatest prudes, believed that sex was a positive good within marriage and that sexual satisfaction was pleasing in the eyes of God. So this was a lusty bunch of folks, well-lubricated with alcohol, cider, and small beer…”[i]

     While there were sources of regulation in colonial America intended to prevent the spread of sexuality outside of marriage, many of these failed.  The church house for example was a place where the preacher might exhort his congregation to practice behaviors that were good in the Lords eye.  Jonathan Edwards was famous for his fire and brimstone sermons that threatened,  "There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God....They deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God's using his power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins"

One might presume that such fiery and theatrical sermons would frighten anyone away from indulging in sex outside of the fold of marriage.  Yet it is an absolute fallacy to assume that all early Americans were both Christian and churchgoers.  It seems that the Puritans take up too large a place in the cultural memory of contemporary Americans.  Certainly the good people of New England who lived in close knit communities found church attendance incredibly important.  But those who lived in the southern colonies of the Chesapeake would have found attending church troublesome.  Many lived miles apart from each other on isolated farms.  In fact, in many places outside of New England, preachers traveled on a yearly circuit.  They may only have been in a particular village for a few weeks a year.  European visitors traveling through North Carolina in the colonial era complained of the backwoods folks who believed in common-law marriages, in which they simply proclaimed themselves married and began living together.  While such a union may have violated colonial laws, which were based on English Common Law, they were often accepted by the community and tolerated by the governing officials due to the scarcity of clergy in remote areas.
      Within marriage, sex was considered incredibly important in bonding together husband and wife.  Midwifery manuals such as “Aristotle's Masterpiece” taught that both man and woman must orgasm in order to conceive a child.  Thus, prior to the discovery of the role of the sperm and egg in conception in the late 18^th century, the sexual pleasure of both partners was greatly encouraged.  But how exactly did colonists do the deed when many of the earliest Americans lived in one room houses?  

According to the diaries of colonial Americans, it was not uncommon for children to sleep in the same bed in which their parents were quietly copulating.  Such an act in today’s world might solicit a call to Child Protective Services, but in the Colonial era, limited space meant that families had to make-do with what they had.  With the inability of colonial courtrooms and church houses to truly regulate sexuality, it was certainly not limited to marriage.  While rates of prenuptial pregnancy were relatively low prior to 1750 (roughly 10% of all couples were pregnant upon marriage) this number skyrocketed to 30% in the second half of the 18^th century.  What could be the cause of such a jump in bastardy rates?  The practice of bundling was perhaps to blame.  If you’ve ever seen Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot,” then you have seen an excellent example of bundling between the character played by Heath Ledger and his fiancé.  In the latter half of the century, parents let their children share a bed with their betrothed as long as they were either sewn into sleeping bag type devices or had a bundling board between them.  In some cases, if a daughter’s betrothed was visiting from afar, parents even shared a bed with the younger couple.  Despite the fact that such couples faced fines and the possibility of both a whipping and excommunication from church, it clearly wasn’t unusual for the young couple to slip through their restraints and have carnal knowledge of one another.

Because bastardy rates continued to rise in the last half of the 18^th century, regulations were put in place to keep single mothers from ending up on communal welfare and also to keep them from committing infanticide.  If a woman refused to admit who had fathered her bastard child, a process known as “12 Angry Women” was begun.  It was believed that during the pains of labor a woman could not lie.  Thus, the single mother would be surrounded by 12 midwives and female community members and questioned about her ‘baby daddy’.  Some gave in due to the sheer stress of the situation, and when they did, lawmakers held the man they cited as responsible for the upbringing of the baby.  In some cases, they even forced the couple to marry.  In addition to these issues, colonial officials experienced an increase in mothers committing infanticide, or killing their infants upon birth.  Many of these cases involved young single women who had been “seduced” or voluntarily joined into an affair with a married man.  They might choose to simply stop breastfeeding the child or even to kill him immediately after birth in an attempt to hide their pregnancy altogether.  Because of this, lawmakers enacted bastardy laws that stated if any bastard child was found dead, the mother was presumed guilty of infanticide, unless of course she had a witness.  Thus, single pregnant mothers were increasingly encouraged to seek out the counsel of midwives, rather than going off into the woods for a silent, painful, and dangerous secret childbirth.

Even more troubling to colonial lawmakers and moralists were those sexual deviants who were not betrothed to their partners.  In the case of sixteen year old Thomas Granger, the partner wasn’t even human!  Colonial buggery laws were very strict, as most people believed that copulation with an animal might produce a monstrously half-human, half-animal offspring.  In the case of Thomas Granger who admitted to having had sex with a turkey, a mare, a cow, two calves, two goats, and many sheep, the animals were first lined up in front of him and then shot.  Thomas was then hanged in September of 1642; the first man in the New World to be punished thusly for copulation with animals.   
Other sex crimes included adultery, the punishment for which might include death in the harshest cases, fines, whipping, wearing of the letters AD on an outfit or branding of the forehead!  Can you imagine if all the adulterers of contemporary society were either jailed and fined or put to death for their indiscretion?  I would imagine that the population would drop precipitously.

In discussing sexual “deviancy” in colonial America, many of my students have asked about the role that homosexuality played.  I could certainly devote an entire blog entry to the history of the concept of sexual identity, and homosexuality in particular.  But to put it shortly, the concept of sexual identity did not exist during this time.  Were a man to be caught in a sodomitical act, they would simply have been punished for sodomy.  As with any other sexual crime in the colonial era, were they to accept their punishment and apologize to the community and church, they would have been welcomed back.  Women, who clearly could not be arrested for sodomy due to their lack of ability to penetrate, might be arrested for “women’s acts against nature” if caught in a sexual relationship with another woman.  But they too were simply punished for their sexual misconduct, rather than being labeled with a particular sexual identity.  It really wasn’t until the 19^th century that doctors would bring about the stigmatization of homosexual identity. 

The final act of sexual deviancy that I’m going to look at is one that I find the most controversial; rape.  In early America, the act of raping a woman who was under the age of 10, engaged, or married could garner the death penalty for the rapist.  To be found guilty of rape required a woman or even a girl as young as 8 to provide witnesses that she had not consented to the sex.  But what about unmarried women over the age of 10?  To put it bluntly, under the laws of coverture, these women were not protected.  In the colonial mindset, a rapist harmed the property that belonged to a father of a young girl, a fiancé, or a husband.  Any married woman was considered a feme covert, and her legal identity was subsumed by that of their husband.  Thus, the rapist had to make amends to that particular man financially.  Yet a feme sole, any women who never married or was widowed, was not protected by the law.  They had very little recourse to redress the grievance of having been raped.  In many ways this seems like an attempt by law makers to scare women into submission and acceptance of patriarchal institutions of power.  Whatever the cause, rape was a devastating event in a woman’s life, not simply for its terrifying psychological damage, but also for the damage to a woman’s reputation.

Given the amount of sex that was being had in colonial America, it’s not particularly surprising that women often gave birth to 10 or more children, and remained pregnant from the time they were married (around 18-20 years of age) until they reached menopause.  This is equally unsurprising when you consider the fact that until the 19^th century contraception was limited to postponing breastfeeding, coitus interruptus (the pull out method), vaginal sponges, lemon wedges, laxatives and a few other risky birth control methods.  The strain this put on the female body must have been incredible.  

For further information on sexuality in early America consider the following sources:

• Richard Godbeer “The Sexual Revolution in Early America"
• Sharon Block “Rape and Sexual Power in Early America"
• John D’ Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman “Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America"
• Jonathan Katz “The Invention of Heterosexuality" 
• Thomas A. Foster “Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America” and his “Sex and the 18^th Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America” 
• Clare A. Lyons  “Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1780-1830” 
•  Stephanie Koontz “The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900"

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[i] http://mybeautifulwickedness.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/doing-the-nasty-in-colonial-america/