Liberating abortion, p.13
Liberating Abortion, page 13
A combination of the impending emancipation of enslaved Black people, resistance by Native Americans and Mexicans defending against settlers stealing land, and the influx of Catholic, Chinese, and eastern and southern European immigrants stoked the nativist fears of white men in power in the United States. They feared not having the numerical population to maintain political control. Medical journals published a few case studies and data sets about patients doctors saw who needed abortions. Increasingly, they noted that the demographics of who was reportedly having abortions were changing; rather than the “wayward,” “licentious” unmarried young women engaged in affairs, white, married, Protestant, US-born, middle- and upper-class women were having abortions. They were using pennyroyal and tansy pills to delay childbearing or to declare their family complete.
This development struck fear in white doctors. It had been happening under their noses because they were not engaged in pregnancy health care. Medical schools limited enrollment to wealthier white men, while membership to the newly created medical associations barred midwives, Asian medicine practitioners, and medical school graduates from unrecognized institutions such as Black schools. Doctors maligned midwives as “unscientific” and “uneducated” for using learned African, Indigenous, Chinese, and rural European herbs and healing methods. The care midwives provided was based on patient needs and health, whereas white Western medicine was driven by capitalism and the needs of slave owners. Discrediting midwives’ services served two purposes: removing women from the medical field and forcing low-income people, immigrants, and communities of color into the burgeoning medical system.
During enslavement, Black midwives held domain over childbirth, for Black and white babies alike. Although data from that period is sketchy, an estimated 70 to 90 percent of white women enslavers’ births were attended by midwives (enslaved Black or white). After emancipation, some Black women continued to offer their midwifery services to the Black community and white women for nominal fees. The new field of gynecology, led by the white physician Dr. J. Marion Sims, practiced barbaric methods on enslaved Black women and published results in medical journals, gaining notoriety. The AMA, founded in 1847, went out of its way to bar the participation of women and Black doctors and eventually became the epicenter of antiabortion fervor and policy. The AMA sought to elevate white male physicians as the sole bearers of medical authority at the expense of midwives and community providers. Physicians began to refer to abortion using derogatory terms such as “murder” or “antenatal infanticide.” And they portrayed abortion providers as incompetent quacks who were only in it for the cash. Physicians wanted total control of reproduction.
Separating white women from midwives was easier than separating communities of color and immigrants from midwives. As white settlers and the US government forcibly removed Native American tribes from their lands and onto reservations, they also forced tribes into substandard medical care. White medical providers believed that Indigenous women, like Black women, had pain-free births and disparaged their birth and infant-rearing practices, such as body feeding, saving umbilical cords, and carrying babies on cradleboards. As part of tribal agreements with the US government, Native American tribes were promised access to health care; that’s where the Indian Health Service and other programs come from. The government placed hospitals on the reservations but rarely employed midwives to participate in birthing, leaving the direction of the care in the hands of white doctors whom Native American people neither trusted nor felt respected by. Additionally, the campaign to dehumanize midwives as providing inferior medical care eventually left Native Americans with few birth attendants, because the government viewed midwives and traditional healers as a hindrance to their plan for assimilation. The government dispatched white field matrons to further push Native American women into assimilationist health practices. Infant and maternal deaths were blamed on midwives, not on the obviously devastating impact colonization had on the tribes.
Being restricted to living on reservations caused malnourishment among many tribes. Some were relocated to lands they weren’t accustomed to, and nomadic tribes were unable to follow herds of buffalo for food. The tribes became dependent on the US government for food rations, which were provided at the discretion of local authorities. As food sources dwindled, Native Americans became malnourished, and the infant mortality rate rose. Tribes such as the Crow were already accustomed to using abortion when food rations were low. But as abortion bans made their way west, the procedure became a crime on reservations as well.
In Reproduction on the Reservation, Brianna Theobald writes about the government employees who reported on the sexual practices of the Crow and other Indigenous tribes, including abortion. These government agents used the alleged sexual promiscuity of the tribes to substantiate the government’s involvement in reproductive monitoring. In the Montana Territory, Agent Samuel G. Reynolds, a superintendent of the Crow Reservation, took it upon himself to identify abortion as his crusade, tying its prevalence to the Crow’s land allotment. In 1905, he argued that if the Crow continued to have abortions, he would allocate smaller land lots for families and the tribe overall. It was a vicious gaslighting cycle: government officials blamed abortions for Native Americans’ loss of their land while actively stealing the land and causing unhealthy pregnancies that led to a need for abortions.
Although the Crow were still able to provide one another with abortions, government agents such as Reynolds took to watching women’s bodies and recording their pregnancies closely. He engaged police, as well as Native American men, to spy on those who had abortions and exact punishment on all who did not comply with the abortion ban. He reached out to Native American men to “use their influence to eliminate the practice.” Even before the white colonizer insistence, colonial pressures had, decades earlier, prompted a council of Cherokee men to enact a law criminalizing abortion and issuing a punishment of fifty lashes. Theobald also argues that the forced conversion to Christianity may have played a role in the declining use of abortion.
As the Supreme Court was poised to recriminalize abortion based on decisions devoid of consideration for historical analysis, some white people in the United States called for abortion clinics to be set up on federal lands to avoid being governed by state abortion restrictions. Knowing the history of colonization makes this opportunistic and exploitative proposal excruciatingly painful. Native sovereignty is just that—sovereignty, not the convenience of white people in the United States.
Insufferable White Men and Their Comstockery
As the prevalence of the abortion business grew during the nineteenth century, so did the frustration of physicians, legislators, and nativists. Their consternation was stoked by one doctor in particular: Dr. Horatio Storer.
Dr. Storer was a Boston-born white physician and the son of a prominent physician, Dr. D. Humphreys Storer. Both father and son specialized in gynecology, documenting diseases women suffered from and focusing their work on the ills of abortion. The younger Storer railed against abortion at all points during a pregnancy harder than anyone else had at the time. Given his prolific writing, he quickly became the leader of the AMA’s campaign to rid the nation of abortion.
Storer hated everything abortion afforded middle- and upper-class white women and the demographic shift it was creating. He worked within the AMA to create a committee to investigate and eliminate abortion, and by 1859, the AMA passed resolutions condemning the procedure and delegitimizing doctors who provided care. Storer didn’t believe the nation’s laws went far enough, and he organized doctors to make theirs the singular profession responsible for “shutting the great gates of human death.”
In his book Why Not? A Book for Every Woman, he wrote that, for healthy women, “occasional child-bearing is an important means of healthful self-preservation.” For those who couldn’t physically carry a pregnancy, he believed they should receive medical attention for their ailments but remain pregnant no matter what. Mostly, he was deeply concerned with US white birth rates. In 1868, with slavery abolished and Black people legally free to procreate on their own terms, immigrants moving to the country, and hordes of white soldiers dead, Storer saw banning abortion as the solution:
All the fruitfulness of the present generation, tasked to its utmost, can hardly fill the gaps in our population that have of late been made by disease and the sword, while the great territories of the far West, just opening to civilization, and the fertile savannas of the South, now disinthralled and first made habitable by freeman, offer homes for the countless millions yet unborn. Shall they be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question that our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 fueled anti-Asian sentiments, barring Chinese immigrants from entering the country, separating those who were already here from their families. Newspapers underlined the connection between nativist and antiabortion arguments. Similarly, in 1888, the Chicago Times raised concern for the nativist reproductive beliefs of US Protestants by asking, “Is the Anglo-Saxon-American race to be driven out by the healthy sons and daughters . . . of Celtic, Teutonic [German], and Latin origin?”
Storer used his abortion campaign to deride women’s desire for freedom in society and declared abortions as “unchristian, immoral, and physically detrimental.” He deplored the newspapers that ran abortion providers’ advertisements.
Sharing Storer’s thoughts on eradicating abortion—after being disgusted by the prevalence of brothels, sex toys, pornography, and abortion pills—a young Anthony Comstock dreamed up a plan to destroy the vices of the nation through the mail system.
When Comstock was ten years old, he found his mother dead of a hemorrhage after giving birth to his youngest sister. Unfortunately, that had no impact on his understanding of the overall dangers of childbirth. Comstock’s abhorrence of the lewd behavior of his fellow Union soldiers began during the Civil War and multiplied as he walked New York City streets. He believed that birth control, free love, and abortion advocates of the mid-nineteenth century were the root of all evil and spent his early twenties investigating saloons illegally operating on Sundays and printers of pornography. He grew upset that he was unable to shut these vices down because they paid handsome bribes to police and judges. He found like minds in the membership of the New York Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and met with government leaders and legislators interested in coming up with a potential law that would solve the problem. The YMCA members pooled their money, creating the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), which had governmental power to investigate, search, and seize newspapers, books, photos, sex toys, and other items used as part of illegal vices.
Comstock was obsessed with maintaining a Christian society. While we weren’t able to find much on his explicit views on people of color, he maintained detailed NYSSV records identifying the nationality and religious affiliation of the people he prosecuted. Historian Amy Werbel explained his records for the “Negro” category were light. At the time, refugees from Eastern Europe, including Jews, were coming to the US. He considered the rise of immigrants to be a problem and praised the “noble” Commissioner of Immigration in “his heroic efforts to keep undesirable classes from our shores.” Additionally, the rate of Jews he prosecuted tripled. He had deep pronatalist views that shaped his opposition to reproductive freedom and sexual liberation. “Comstock may have been uninterested in the salvation of America’s Black community,” Werbel writes in a chapter from The Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States, “but his arrest blotters make clear that he worried very much that Jewish and other immigrant communities threatened to undermine his dream of a Christian nation.”
Eventually, Comstock took his pleas for abstinence to Congress, which responded with An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use (18 U.S. Code §§ 1461 and 1462), commonly known as the Comstock Act of 1873, which gave states a renewed push to criminalize abortion in every way possible. The law made it illegal to use the postal service or other interstate transport to give out “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material or publish any information on how to use contraception, prevent sexually transmitted infections, or obtain an abortion. The law also gave Comstock the power, as a special agent of the US Post Office, to arrest anyone he found to be in violation of the law. He went after everyone, making enemies everywhere, even to the point that an assailant cut him with a pocket knife, severing four facial arteries (prompting his enemies to call him Scar-faced Tony). Comstock often conducted the raids himself, posing as a husband looking for birth control pills for his wife and at one point arresting Madame Restell when she supplied them in 1878. Arresting Madame Restell was a career get for Comstock and a huge hit to the abortion movement. But Restell would never let a man like Comstock take her down. Rather than finish the trial, Restell died by suicide the same year she was arrested.
As the nation became more conservative, living under the puritanical Comstock laws, the tolerance for vices fell. White suffragettes called abortion a “symptom of a more deep-seated disorder of the social state” and decried the men who used abortion providers to cover up their transgressions. In 1920, however, the former Soviet Union legalized abortion, which was a cornerstone of feminist efforts throughout Europe and a practice midwives brought with them when they immigrated to the United States. There were efforts to legalize the procedure in the United States, but they faced opposition from physicians and little support from birth control advocates who wanted to prioritize contraceptive access to avoid the need for abortion altogether.
Comstock’s continued vendetta against sex didn’t stop abortion pill providers from advertising in newspapers. They just had to be slicker and more vague. Their clients knew what to look for to order their pills, but many still needed procedures. Newspapers increasingly ran articles covering the stories of women who died from procedural abortions and the arrests and trials of their providers. If it bleeds, it leads, as they say. Rather than common death announcements, some contained salacious details of illegal operations, sex scandals, and the questionable skill sets of doctors and midwives whose race—“negress” or “colored”—was overemphasized.
The Early Criminalization of Black Providers
The story of Mildred Campbell, a Black midwife at the turn of the century, captured newspaper headlines for years even though she was never actually convicted of a death related to abortion. Her story was one of the earliest we found of a Black midwife who was reported on so expansively, and her race was mentioned often. Mildred was described as a “mulatto, intelligent looking, and about middle aged” Black woman who provided midwifery services and operated a boardinghouse offering rooms to many young women traveling to Washington, DC. In August 1897, she was arrested after Abbie Compher, a white mother of four in her midthirties, died of blood poisoning, allegedly as the result of a procedural abortion. According to newspaper coverage of the trial at the time, Abbie had ordered abortion pills, but they didn’t work, and she asked Mildred, who had delivered her fourth child, to provide her with an abortion. Abbie’s husband claimed that Mildred had come to the grocery store he owned looking for Abbie and then went upstairs to care for her, and after she left Abbie was in more pain and eventually died a few weeks later. Mildred was arrested and her home was searched, turning up a pocket surgical case with instruments used in an “illegal feature of midwifery” that were determined by the coroner as “having no place in the legitimate profession of nurse or midwifery.”
Newspaper coverage of Mildred Campbell’s arrest from the Evening Star in Washington, DC, August 3, 1897.
At the inquest, doctors testified that there was internal evidence of decomposing matter and evidence that a child had been born and thus that a later abortion had been performed. One of her lawyers, John Mercer Langston, was a multiracial (Black, Pamunkey tribe, and white) abolitionist who helped free enslaved Black people via the Underground Railroad and served as the first Black congressman representing Virginia. (He was the great-uncle of the poet Langston Hughes, and several historic landmarks in Washington, DC, are named after him.) At trial, Langston questioned the doctors, getting them to admit that it was possible Abbie had performed the abortion on herself and noting that her husband was confused when Abbie became ill.
The newspapers reported that Mildred was “a fleshy mulatto” who “sat calmly” during the inquest, but “most of the time she picked her teeth with a straw.” Her behavior seemed to point to her guilt. Although the inquest jury found Mildred responsible and remanded her to jail on $2,500 bail (over $90,000 today), she was able to pay her bail, and at the trial the following year she was vindicated. The case hinged on the testimony of Black community members, such as doctors who testified that Mildred was too ill to have attended to Abbie and a young Black woman at the boardinghouse who contradicted Abbie’s husband’s story about hand-delivering a note to Mildred, who was illiterate, asking her to come care for Abbie. The jury deliberated for a short time, and Mildred was acquitted of manslaughter.
We assume Mildred went right back to providing abortions, because she was again arrested in 1901 after the death of Hattie Coxen, a Black schoolteacher in a nearby town who told friends she was going to Washington, DC, and ended up at Mildred’s boardinghouse paying $7 for a week of lodging. The coroner determined that the cause of Hattie’s death was an inflamed abdomen and blood poisoning, and that a child had been delivered a week before her death. Mildred was arrested, but because of testimony from a Black guest who confirmed that the timing of Hattie’s arrival didn’t match up with the coroner’s account, Mildred was exonerated and discharged. She had the same outcome in 1904, when she was arrested for the death of Georgie Alexander, a Black woman in her thirties whose deathbed statements led to the accusation, and again in 1905, when Emma Pratt, an eighteen-year-old Black girl, presented at the hospital with complications from an abortion. With each case, the coverage dwindled, and patients kept showing up for “rooms” at Mildred’s boardinghouse.
