Abortion opponents who identify suffragists as foremothers of their movement often home in on unsigned articles in Stanton and Anthony’s Revolution. The identity of the elusive “A,” who authored the essay that deemed abortion both “infanticide” and “child-murder,” is unclear, but as the Susan B. Anthony Museum and House notes, other Revolution stories signed by “A” hold “some uncomfortable surprises for those who want to believe that Anthony wrote them.” One story discusses “a technical controversy about mechanics, hardly Anthony’s field of expertise,” while another sparked a debate in which the newspaper’s editors addressed the author as “Mr. A.”
Crucially for modern debates, the unknown author of the article spoke out against the criminalization of abortion—a measure contemporaneously proposed by a prominent medical journal. “I cannot believe such a law would have the desired effect,” the author wrote. “It seems to be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains.” After describing men’s legal control over women, “A” lamented that the “wife has … no right over her own body.”
Even as the author acknowledged women’s lack of agency, they argued that abortions “burden her conscience in life [and] her soul in death.” This reference to the guilt ostensibly felt by those who undergo abortions is often cited by contemporary anti-abortion activists, who “miss the context and neglect to print the rest” of the essay, wrote Anthony experts Lynn Sherr and Ann D. Gordon for Time in 2015.
Historians will likely never know who wrote “Marriage and Maternity.” What they do know is that Anthony often signed her articles with “S.B.A.,” not “A.” And abortion wasn’t a primary focus for the Revolution, which chiefly functioned as a forum for the exchange of multiple points of view about the era’s issues.
Ultimately, the archive of written work and speeches delivered by suffragists simply doesn’t indicate that abortion was at the forefront of discussions about women’s rights during the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. Suffragists are not on record in any overwhelming way as being for or against abortion, though it’s reasonable to informedly speculate that at least some agreed with the broader societal move toward restricting or ending legalized abortion.
It’s also possible that some suffragists, especially those who were formerly enslaved, embraced abortion as an extension of the autonomy and fuller recognition of personhood they sought via voting rights. Arguments for voluntary motherhood by unnamed women appeared in local publications like the Women’s Advocate of Dayton, Ohio, with one author writing, “[L]et us hear no more invectives against women for the destruction of prospective unwelcome children, whose dispositions, made miserable by unhappy ante-natal conditions, would only make their lives a curse to themselves and others.”