Can that woman sleep?

‘Things being as they are,’ the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote in her 1971 essay ‘A Defence of Abortion’, two years before Roe v. Wade, ‘there isn’t much a woman can safely do to abort herself. So the question asked is what a third party may do.’ By third parties, Thomson meant abortionists. In her essay Thomson compared the situation of a woman or girl pregnant against her will to being kidnapped by a group of music lovers and having a famous violinist’s ‘circulatory system … plugged into yours’ because you alone possess the correct blood type to save the violinist from a fatal kidney disease. Thomson argued that if a third party decided to help unplug this person from the violinist, there would be ‘no injustice’, tragic though the violinist’s death would be. The third party might even be seen as a good Samaritan, according to Thomson. Why? Because, in such a situation, ‘you cannot extricate yourself.’

In describing third parties as ‘good Samaritans’, Thomson was probably not thinking of Madame Restell, who was by far the most successful New York abortionist of the 19th century and as far from a good Samaritan as anyone could imagine. Restell was a self-publicist on an epic scale who was said to possess an ‘inordinate greed for money’. She marketed herself as an exotic Frenchwoman with decades of training in women’s medicine when she was really a seamstress from a small town in the Cotswolds who never lost her strong English accent. One contemporary, the playwright and diplomat Mordecai Manuel Noah, wrote that she was ‘gloriously attired in rich silks and laces, towers above her sex in a splendid carriage, snaps her fingers at the law and all its pains and punishments and cries out for new victims and more gold. Can that woman sleep?’

Restell monetised the desperation of other women into a supremely lucrative business. In 1860, the Chicago Tribune reported that ‘she has three grandchildren who will inherit about $400,000 when Madame Restell turns up her toes.’ In 1867, the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph described her as ‘one of the principal diamond owners in New York’. A single one of her brooches cost $15,000 (around $280,000 in modern money). When she was arrested for the final time in 1878, Restell said that she would like to ‘take oysters’ first because she had not yet had lunch. She insisted on travelling to court in her own carriage, driven by a coachman dressed in purple and pulled by two grey horses.

For all of her self-interest and avarice, however, Restell does seem to have had one great and almost unheard-of quality in a 19th-century abortionist: she did not make a habit of killing her clients. In her slangy but always entertaining life of Restell, Jennifer Wright argues that the ‘most remarkable aspect of Madame Restell’s practice is that, despite some accusations, there’s little evidence that any patients died in her care.’ In other words, Restell was probably the best third party anyone in New York could hope for. For those who could pay her fees – the charge for a surgical abortion peaked at $200 – Restell had an unusual talent for extricating women safely from pregnancy (‘safe’ is a very relative term when it comes to Victorian obstetrics). The strongest evidence for her skill is the fact that she seems to have had a lot of repeat customers. Some women claimed to have induced five successful miscarriages using Restell’s pills and other customers supposedly had as many as ten surgical abortions. This is in itself something of a miracle, given that she began practising in the 1830s, long before Semmelweis’s observations on the benefits of handwashing to avoid infection were put forward, never mind popularised.

It is possible that some of Restell’s clients did die as a result of her operations but that these deaths were hushed up by their relatives out of the same sense of shame that sent these women to an illegal abortionist in the first place. Wright, however, thinks it is unlikely that such deaths could have been kept secret, given Restell’s many enemies and rivals. She also notes that many of those rivals are on the record as having killed some of their clients. Take Mrs Bird, one of Restell’s main competitors in the 1830s and 1840s, who sold ‘tonic renovating vegetable pills’, marketed euphemistically as being for ‘females in delicate health’. In 1841, Bird was discovered trying to dispose of the coffin of a 17-year-old girl who had haemorrhaged and died after a botched abortion. In the 1850s, an abortionist called Mrs Mastin tried to operate on a girl using a catheter and killed her, leading to a charge of second-degree manslaughter. In 1871, a Polish saloon owner who styled himself Dr Jacob Rosenzweig (he bought his diploma for $40) operated on a 22-year-old called Alice Bowlsby who died two days later of peritonitis. Rosenzweig stuffed her naked body in a trunk and tried to put it on a train to Chicago, a plan which went awry when railway officials noticed a stench. Restell was never found guilty of killing a woman, although she did serve time in jail for killing foetuses.

One of the central mysteries of Restell’s life is how she learned to perform abortions, let alone to a relatively consistent standard. She was born Ann Trow in 1811 in Painswick, Gloucestershire. Her father and mother both worked at the local woollen mill and Ann was sent into service aged fifteen, working for a butcher’s family. Wright wonders whether the animal cadavers helped give her a basic understanding of anatomy. Aged sixteen, she left the job to marry a tailor called Henry Sommers. He turned out to be an alcoholic, and to compensate for what she called his ‘dissipation and idleness’, she taught herself how to do his tailoring work. The hand-eye co-ordination required would also have been of use to her in the abortion trade.

In 1831, the couple sailed for New York with their baby daughter, Caroline, in search of better wages. They lived on Oliver Street in Lower Manhattan, and Henry found work in a tailor’s shop. Two years after they arrived, he died of typhoid. A widow with a young child, Ann Trow Sommers moved to Chatham Street, a neighbourhood of cheap lodging houses and saloons, and took in laundry and mending work. She discovered that laundresses and seamstresses in America were no better paid than they had been in Painswick. The average seamstress in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.

A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir d’Amore, a quack who sells a range of ‘patent medicines’, which turn out to be just red wine. Trow started working for Evans and was said to have learned ‘many secrets of the business’ from him. She started manufacturing her own brand of sugar pills as a sideline to seamstressing. At first, she sold pills for lung ailments and stomach complaints, but when a woman came to her asking for something to induce a miscarriage she realised there was a still more lucrative market.

Five dollars would buy you a pack of her birth control powders; a dollar, a packet of abortion pills. One of Restell’s critics claimed that these pills were nothing but ‘bread coated with sugar’, but this was not so. The 1830s version contained ergot of rye (a type of fungus) and cantharides (the dried bodies of Spanish flies), both of which were considered effective and relatively safe ways to induce an abortion, according to a contemporary medical journal. She later sold vials of oil of tansy mixed with turpentine. These ingredients were also considered efficient abortifacients, although they were potentially deadly. In 1839, the New York Herald reported that a woman called Sarah had used tansy oil – not purchased from Restell – to bring on a miscarriage and died a few hours later. As Wright observes, ‘what’s remarkable is not so much that women flocked to her door but that Madame Restell seems to have managed the dosage of these incredibly dangerous ingredients’ in such a way that her patients survived. There was no money to be made from a dead customer.

The persona of ‘Madame Restell’ was partly the invention of Trow’s second husband, a 26-year-old printer called Charles Lohman whom she married in 1836, a man described after his death as ‘a good ink-fingered … fellow’. Lohman had worked for the New York Herald and was familiar with the hyperbolic claims often found in newspaper advertisements for pills. He knew that the bestselling medicines were always fronted by a charismatic expert. Together, he and Trow magicked up a French woman doctor with experience at hospitals in Paris and Vienna. They claimed she had learned her secrets from her grandmother (‘an eminent female physician in Paris’) and that her methods had been praised in France for thirty years for their ‘efficacy, healthiness and safety’.

They ran numerous advertisements in the New York Herald, attacking Madame Restell’s competitors and suggesting that her pills and powders were the only genuine ones. The ads emphasised that her signature was on each box of pills and warned that many of the other compounds sold were ‘worthless if not injurious’. Her rivals Madame Costello and Mrs Bird tended to use euphemisms in their marketing material: Costello’s ‘female monthly pill’, for example, helped suppress women’s ‘natural illness’. Restell, by contrast, boldly proposed her ‘preventative powders for married ladies whose health prevents too rapid an increase of family’. It was clever to refer to married ladies, giving her cures a veneer of respectability. Her ads went so far as to argue that taking abortion pills could be morally correct, given the harsh economic consequences of large families for poor households. In lines borrowed from the social campaigner Robert Dale Owen, she asked: ‘Is it desirable then, is it moral, for parents to increase their families regardless of the consequences to themselves or the wellbeing to their offspring when a simple, easy, healthy and CERTAIN remedy is within our control?’

By 1839, Restell’s advertisements were boasting that she had sold more than two thousand boxes of pills in New York City in only five months. She expanded her retail operations to Philadelphia and branched out into surgical abortions, using a piece of sharpened whalebone. One patient who sought her services reported that Restell told her: ‘I can probe you, but I must have my price for the operation.’ The woman decided to probe herself instead, but it went wrong and she had to have a hysterectomy.

As Wright notes, it was extraordinary that Restell performed these whalebone abortions for decades without fatalities:

The whalebone would have to be inserted through the cervical os (the opening to the uterus). Doing so would require a remarkably steady hand, as well as knowledge of the appropriate amount of force to use. Even the smallest error could perforate the bowels (which can kill a woman) or the uterine artery (which can also kill a woman). If the procedure was a success, this wouldn’t happen, and the woman would miscarry in two or three days. Yet, even then, she ran the risk of becoming septic, and dying as a result of the infection.

How did Restell learn her surgical art? It is possible that, as with the pill-making, she trained under Evans, whose own advertising claimed that he had been to medical school in England and Scotland. However she learned it, she does seem to have been remarkably skilful.

Wright argues that she offered her patients ‘medications and treatments that were as effective as anything the age had to offer’. Then again, the best abortion treatments of 19th-century New York weren’t something you would wish to put yourself through. Several women (or their families) brought complaints against Restell in the courts on the grounds that she had damaged their health. Wright argues (not always convincingly) that their troubles were essentially unconnected with anything Restell had done to them. In April 1841, a married woman called Ann Maria Purdy died, two years after having gone to Restell for a secret abortion (she already had a ten-month-old child). To pay for the procedure, Purdy pawned a gold watch, a chain and some rings and gave Restell the pawn shop ticket plus the dollar she had with her (one of many things that Wright urges us to admire about Restell is that she operated a sliding fee scale). When Purdy fell ill, her husband – to whom she had confessed the abortion – filed a complaint with the police, who arrested Restell and indicted her for causing premature birth.

Was Restell to blame for Purdy’s death? A newspaper reporting on the case claimed that her illness was due to ‘the injuries she then received, and the brutal violence done to her nature’. But the official cause of death was ‘pulmonary consumption’, which, as Wright points out, could not have been brought on by an abortion. In any case, the charge was not killing a woman but providing an abortion. Restell was initially found guilty and then cleared, on the grounds that the evidence against her was inadmissible because it was gathered on Purdy’s deathbed.

Seven years later, in 1848, she was found guilty of a ‘misdemeanour’ for having aborted the baby of a housekeeper from Orange County called Maria Bodine, who had been impregnated by her employer, Joseph Cook, a widower. The trial offers insights into the way a 19th-century abortionist went about her business. Cook started having sex with Bodine a month after she became his housekeeper; she found herself ‘in the family way’, she told the trial, a year later. By the time she arrived at Restell’s, Bodine was around six months pregnant: well after the ‘quickening’ – the moment when the mother first feels kicking in the womb and, according to Thomas Aquinas, the time when a foetus becomes ‘ensouled’. Restell initially advised that because the pregnancy was so far along, Bodine should board with her at a cost of $5 a week and have the baby, but Bodine insisted on an abortion and negotiated a price of $75. Two days after Restell performed the operation – Wright suggests it was done with a wire – Bodine started to bleed and suffered a ‘violent pain’. Bodine testified that Restell then ‘inserted her hand in my privates’ and she ‘heard something fall from my body’. After a few days of bed rest, tea and crackers, Restell gave her a glass of wine, told her to ‘call me mother’, made her promise not to tell anyone and sent her on her way.

The case only came to court because Bodine visited a doctor who realised that she had had an abortion and reported it to the authorities. She complained of ‘constant distress in my head, pain, falling of the womb, weakness in my back, burning in my hands, weakness and trembling all over me’, but Wright suggests this may have been the result of syphilis combined with over-eager treatment with leeches after Bodine returned to Cook’s house. Restell’s lawyers argued that Bodine’s poor health was the result of her ‘habitual and promiscuous intercourse … with every man, every hour, or every five minutes of her life’. In trying to trash Bodine’s character, they seem to have taken things too far. Restell, who came to court dressed in black silk trimmed with velvet and a white satin bonnet, was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island).

Prison for Restell was not like it was for the other inmates. Lohman paid people on the island to supply her with fresh peaches. When the district attorney visited one day, he noticed that under her ‘hastily donned prison garb’ she was wearing a silk dress. She was also overheard using ‘insulting language’ to a prison officer, but when this was mentioned to Mr Acker, who was in charge of the penitentiary, he refused to discipline her. One of her fellow prisoners reported that she had a feather bed brought to her cell every night and she paid Acker’s wife to send her nice meals three times a day, in addition to ‘tea, coffee, milk, sugar etc and all things good’. Her husband visited her every afternoon and she was allowed to use Acker’s office to receive him.

After her release, Restell returned to her trade and made more money than ever, to judge by the mansion on 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue she built for herself in the 1860s. The location was chosen in part to prove a point. It was across from what would become the new St Patrick’s Cathedral. The archbishop, John Joseph Hughes, had intended to buy the land for his own residence but was outbid by Restell – payback for his denunciation of her from the pulpit. In revenge, Wright says, she built ‘a house so ostentatious that parishioners at St Patrick’s would be forced to look at it every time they went to church’. It was three storeys high and twice as wide as the other houses on the block. Each of its three dining rooms was decorated in gold and bronze, and had vast French mirrors with mosaic gilding. There were stables for her seven horses. In an era when owning a single carriage gave a person entry into the Upper Ten Thousand – the respectable rich of New York City – Restell owned five. It was said that she took her inspiration from Versailles. ‘Call it what you will,’ the Cincinnati Gazette reported, ‘it is a very handsome structure, and a sad comment upon the success of crime.’

In 1866, Restell was accused by a former servant, Eliza Finley, of using the basement to burn babies – Restell had first reported Finley for stealing towels. The presence of the furnace was confirmed by the Sanitary Department of the New York City Board of Health, and Wright notes that Restell didn’t dispute that she used it ‘to burn effluvia’ – Wright’s word. Discussing the Bodine case, she writes that ‘when Maria asked if she could see what had been expelled, Madame Restell sensibly refused. Seeing the discarded contents of any operation might be troubling, but this is especially so for an operation as morally fraught as an abortion.’ Wright’s lack of sympathy for ‘what had been expelled’ sometimes extends to newborns. In 1855, a servant called Frederica Medinger gave birth to a baby under Restell’s care (managing the births of children to unmarried mothers and brokering their adoption was a sideline). Restell said she had placed the baby in Philadelphia, but when Medinger went to look for her child, she couldn’t find it. Restell then told her the baby was dead and to make ‘no more fuss about it’. Wright offers no sympathy for the fate of the child. It reflects how frighteningly precarious abortion rights are in America that it does not feel safe for those of us in the ‘pro-choice’ camp to acknowledge the losses involved in the death of a foetus or a baby. We have seen how such admissions can be weaponised to restrict women’s freedom and do not wish to concede an inch to Thomson’s violinist.

During​ the 1860s medical opinion in the US became more explicitly anti-abortion, thanks to a young gynaecologist called Horatio Storer, who persuaded the American Medical Association to take an official stance against it. Storer argued that the embryo – this ‘future young man’, as he called it – became an independent entity at the very moment of conception and that the destiny of the nation depended on the ‘loins’ of women. If white Protestant women aborted their babies, he said, the western states would be filled with ‘aliens’ (by aliens, he seems to have meant Irish immigrants). In Why Not? A Book for Every Woman (1866) Storer insisted that ‘in no case should abortion be permitted … ill health is no excuse.’ Under his guidance, the AMA formed a Committee on Criminal Abortion that pushed for stricter laws against abortion and against the midwives and other women who performed them. There was a degree of self-interest in this. Midwives and doctors were professional rivals and there was a financial incentive for male doctors to convince the public that midwives could not be trusted with women’s health. Wright notes that AMA policy didn’t alter ‘for over a hundred years, until 1967’. In 1869, the New York State Legislature introduced a law making abortion a misdemeanour regardless of how early in pregnancy it was carried out. The same year, the Catholic Church stated that abortion was a form of homicide at any stage of pregnancy, eliminating the idea that ‘ensoulment’ only took place after the quickening.

In the 1870s, the moral and legal tide in America turned still more sharply against abortion, mainly because of an anti-vice campaigner called Anthony Comstock, who referred to Restell’s splendid mansion as a ‘monument of infamy’. Comstock was the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and had a scar from his temple to his chin, the result of an attack by a pornographer. A religious upbringing on a Connecticut farm left him so obsessed with sin in all its forms that when he was given a ration of whiskey as a Civil War soldier, he poured it on the ground to prevent anyone from drinking it. It was Comstock who in 1873 persuaded legislators to pass the Act for the Suppression of the Trade in and Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, usually known as the Comstock Act, which effectively made it illegal to post not just abortion pills but any kind of information about contraception or abortion in the US mail, by deeming such information ‘obscene’.

Given her reputation as the ‘wickedest woman in New York’, Comstock turned his attention to Restell. One evening in 1878, he knocked on her door in disguise, and after he was admitted into her office, asked for a remedy to prevent a woman friend from giving birth. She asked him whether the woman was married, but he would say only that it was a ‘delicate situation’. She sold him some pills, telling him that ‘in nine cases out of ten’ they would be effective. If they didn’t work, she advised him to return with his lady friend and that it would cost him $200 (around $5000 today). Instead, he returned two weeks later with the police and an arrest warrant. ‘You’ve brought quite a party with you,’ Restell said.

She hired an aggressive lawyer – Orlando T. Stewart, a former judge who was himself staunchly anti-abortion – who told her to ‘go home and take down your sign and if you have any recipes for pills or medicines, burn them. If you have any instruments for this evil purpose, destroy them.’ Stewart also urged her to get rid of her carriage and swap it for a less ostentatious coupé, but she refused, turning up for the first day of the trial in her most beautiful carriage accompanied by her grandson, who sat beside her on satin cushions. By now, her husband had died and her two surviving grandchildren were the only relatives from whom she wasn’t estranged. She had broken with her brother, Joseph, even though he had for thirty years manufactured the ‘preventative powders’ she sold.

The second day of her trial – April Fool’s Day, 1878 – opened with a bombshell. It was announced that she was dead: a woman’s body with her throat slit had been found in Restell’s bathtub by her chambermaid. At the bottom of the tub was a carving knife. Her granddaughter, Carrie, told the New York Times that Restell had recently said to her: ‘I wish I were dead, it would end all.’ Her fortune – estimated at between $600,000 and $1.5 million – went to the grandchildren and her daughter, Caroline, with a proviso that her daughter’s husband (who drank) should not control any of it. The mansion opposite St Patrick’s Cathedral was split between her grandchildren, who continued to live there until 1903, when they sold it for a million dollars.

Opinion was divided over whether Comstock had been right to pursue her. The Cincinnati Enquirer condemned the ‘evil’ of ‘Restellism’ in an America where so many white Christian Americans were childless. Others fiercely attacked Comstock. The Reverend Charles McCarthy gave a speech in Union Square lambasting him for having hunted Restell down by ‘miserable subterfuge, by cunning and heartless fabrication … and by specious arguments which were craftily devised to work on her better nature’. McCarthy noted that she was far from alone in her activities and that the laws against abortion were ‘universally violated by the medical profession’.

One of the lingering mysteries about Restell is whether she really did die in her bathtub. The body was buried in Tarrytown, outside the city. Sometime before her death, she had discussed with a detective whether a New York coroner had the power to order an out-of-town postmortem. The detective assured her that the coroner’s powers were ‘confined to New York’, which turned out to be wrong. When the body was exhumed, the coroner found that it did not ‘greatly resemble’ her. But Stewart, her lawyer, confirmed that the corpse was wearing one of her rings, which was considered adequate proof of identity. It’s possible that she had actually fled to Europe. At her funeral, her grandchildren were ‘gayly attired’ and did not show signs of mourning, despite their closeness to her. After her death, they spent two or three months in France every year. Madame Restell, a fake Frenchwoman for so many decades, may have become a real one in the end.

Wright’s book is understandably preoccupied by the threats to reproductive rights in the US set in motion by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. She laments the thought that there is no equivalent of Madame Restell ‘to assist women’ in this new America where a ten-year-old girl raped in Ohio was forced – a week after the reversal of Roe v. Wade – to travel to Indiana for an abortion. Wright sees Restell as someone who ‘made men really, really mad’, with ‘a place in the pantheon of women with no fucks left to give’. ‘By and large, Americans don’t like learning history,’ she continues.

They like learning propaganda. They enjoy stories that are exclusively about how America is great and always has been. Do not let your children believe in a fictitious, rosy version of the past where every woman was happily a mother. Tell them the true history of this country, where abortion has always been commonly practised … Tell them the history of people like Madame Restell, and the history of her patients, and how common abortion has always been.

What does this story really tell us about reproductive rights? Despite Wright’s best efforts to portray Restell as a feminist hero who was ‘generous’ and ‘empathetic’ to working-class women, you do not come away from her book thinking that Restell transformed the lives of the women she treated for the better. The fact that a third party is essential to the person who wishes to extricate herself does not mean that we have to treat them as saviours.

As Marx didn’t quite say, wealthy abortionists make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. Restell was able to flourish only because she lived during an unusual period – from the mid-1830s to the mid-1860s – when abortion was treated more lightly by the law and public opinion in the US than it would be at any subsequent period until the 1970s. A doctor called Thomas Blatchford wrote to Storer that when he was a ‘young practitioner’ in the early 19th century, abortion was a ‘rare and secret occurrence’, whereas four decades later it had become ‘frequent and bold’. Thanks in large part to Comstock, abortion would again become more secret and less bold and the result – as always, when third-party abortion becomes hard to come by – was a rise in self-administered abortions. In 1888, an American doctor wrote of visiting a wealthy young woman whose parents had asked for help with her heavy periods only to find that her bleeding was the result of ‘self-accomplished abortions’. An obstetrician called Moses Montrose Pallen observed in 1869 – the year the New York law against abortion was strengthened – that he had come across ‘well-to-do’ women who adopted ‘severe and dangerous’ methods because they were ‘ashamed or afraid to apply to the charlatan, who sustains his existence by the price of blood’. Such a woman, he wrote, might go so far as to ‘arm herself with the surgeon’s instruments, and operate upon her own body, that she may be delivered of an embryo, for which she has no desire, and whose birth and appearance she dreads’.

In September, Kamala Harris visited Atlanta to highlight the case of Amber Nicole Thurman, a medical assistant who died aged 28 leaving behind a six-year-old son. Thurman found out that she was pregnant with twins soon after Georgia’s new ban on abortion after six weeks came into effect. She tried to get a surgical termination over the state border in North Carolina, but she was late for the appointment, so she took abortion pills instead. Due to a rare complication, her body failed to expel all of the tissue from her body. A simple fifteen-minute operation – a D&C – would have cleared the tissue from her womb, but her doctors delayed the procedure for twenty hours, as Thurman’s organs failed and the infection spread. The legal cost of helping her seemed too high. Under the new Georgia law, anyone performing a D&C for any reason other than a spontaneously occurring miscarriage faces ten years in jail (and not Restell’s kind of jail with fresh peaches and feather beds). When they finally operated, it was too late to save her.

Towards the end of her essay, Thomson pauses the thought experiment with the violinist and reminds us of what is really at stake: ‘a sick and desperately frightened 14-year-old schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose abortion’ and ‘any law which rules this out is an insane law.’ Wright does not succeed in making the case for Restell as a ‘nurturing and empathetic’ third party, but she does convey very effectively the dreadful predicament of the countless women who felt and feel so trapped by pregnancy that they would risk their own lives and/or pay their last dollar to a huckster in the hope of ending it because, try as you might, you cannot extricate yourself.