Abortion has gone from being legal to illegal in this country before, and with Roe in jeopardy, advocates for reproductive freedom have forecast a future that looks much like our past, when pills were a major part of abortion access—and an obsessive target for abortion opponents.
The story of abortion regulation and criminalization in the U.S. begins, in some ways, with the sale of abortion pills. Such open business was part of the reason states pushed to pass the first laws governing abortion in the 1820s and 1830s, according to Lauren MacIvor Thompson, historian at Georgia State University and author of the forthcoming Battle for Birth Control: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Rivalry That Shaped a Movement. “But they were mostly only governing the advertising and sale of abortifacient drugs.” The laws were meant to regulate, not to outlaw, abortion, she told me in an email.
Perhaps the most notorious target of these bans was a New York woman who went by the assumed title of Madame Restell. To get around the law, abortion was advertised as a cure for “stoppage of the menses”—“which was accurate,” noted professor of journalism history Marvin Olasky, “in that the leading cause of menstrual stoppage among women of child-bearing age was pregnancy.” Restell, née Ann Lohman, was a midwife who sold abortifacient drugs in the city’s leading papers in the 1840s without using the word “abortion.” Yet her ads, Olasky wrote, were “designed to sell the idea of abortion itself.” One such ad, in The New York Herald, read:
In how many instances does the hard working father, and more especially the mother of a poor family, remain slaves throughout their lives, tugging at the oar of incessant labor, toiling but to live and living but to toil, when they might have enjoyed comfort and comparative affluence.…
Such ads proffered an illicit act for sale—one that was difficult to prosecute due to ambiguous laws and a cloud of secrecy among clients, but a crime nonetheless—and some newspaper editors refused to run them. Others defended their acceptance of the ads on the grounds that they should not be in the business of rejecting advertisements based on the profession of the advertiser. It was also good business sense, Olasky explained. He estimated that Restell’s ads could bring in $650 annually for one paper in 1839, “at a time when decent New York apartments cost $5 or $6 per month.”