Abortion Before Roe

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Speaker 9 A note before we get started: this episode contains graphic descriptions of abortion and suicide.

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Speaker 12 The police were startled by the announcement that the well-known Madame Restel had been found dead earlier this morning in the bathroom of her mansion on Fifth Avenue.

Speaker 12 She rose in the night and went into the bathroom where she suicided.

Speaker 12 The coroner's physician examined the body and found that a deep gash had been cut across the front of the throat, severing the jugular vein.

Speaker 12 The water had been left running in the bathtub, and hence there was but little blood in the water, which still filled the tub.

Speaker 12 The body was cold, and it was evident that the woman had been dead for some hours.

Speaker 12 Read all about it. Morning paper, read all about it,

Speaker 9 In the early hours of Wednesday, April 1st, 1878, the death of a woman named Madame Rostel, known to some as the wickedest woman in New York, read all about it, rocked the country.

Speaker 11 The Morning Herald, Wilmington, Delaware.

Speaker 14 Madame Rostell found dead. Madame Rostell left a fortune estimated at from $1,000,000 to $1,500,000.

Speaker 9 The New York Times.

Speaker 15 Having for nearly 40 years been before the public as a woman who is growing rich by the practice of a nefarious business, she yesterday came to a violent end by cutting her throat ear to ear.

Speaker 11 The Cincinnati Daily Star, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Speaker 16 Another story is that Madame Rostell was murdered through the instigation of wealthy people who had patronized her in her criminal business.

Speaker 9 Clarksville Weekly Chronicle, Clarksville, Tennessee.

Speaker 17 Crimes of this wretched woman were not hers alone. They were the crimes of a splendid, profligate society, of which she was simply the paid agent.

Speaker 17 She has simply done upon herself the vengeance which the law should have inflicted many years ago.

Speaker 17 Systematic murder was her trade, the murder of the unborn, perpetrated to shield the guilty lusts of the living.

Speaker 17 We are using language which will be blamed as shocking to society, but society needs to be shocked.

Speaker 9 Madame Rostel was one of the key targets of a moral crusade that had swept the country. A crusade that started in the 1800s and led to a century of criminalizing abortion.

Speaker 9 A century that came to an end in the early 1970s.

Speaker 18 Good evening. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortions.

Speaker 18 The majority said that the decision to end the pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government.

Speaker 18 Thus, Thus, the anti-abortion laws of 46 states were rendered unconstitutional.

Speaker 9 Roe versus Wade.

Speaker 19 People,

Speaker 20 I think, still think that

Speaker 20 abortion was never practiced and was always illegal until the Supreme Court decision in 1973.

Speaker 20 And they think that the decision

Speaker 20 created the practice of abortion and expanded it.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 that is completely wrong. That is not true.

Speaker 20 It was legal under common law in the colonial era in what is now the United States and in the early United States.

Speaker 20 It was not made criminal in the way that we think of it from conception on until late 19th century. And

Speaker 20 throughout all that time, abortion was practiced

Speaker 20 by many people and really accepted in a certain way by Americans.

Speaker 11 This is historian Leslie Regan. She's a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and author of the book When Abortion Was a Crime, Women Medicine and Law in the United States.

Speaker 11 In the country's early days, people like Madame Rostel were thriving.

Speaker 20 When she began her practice around the 1830s, she wasn't hiding her practice at all, but nor was anybody else.

Speaker 20 She just was much, she was, she was a very good businesswoman, made a lot of money, and was very rich and obvious in New York City.

Speaker 11 But by the end of her life in 1878, Madame Rostel was facing criminal prosecution, and some had branded her a monster in human shape. Her name had become synonymous with abortion.

Speaker 9 Over the course of a couple decades, the country had moved from thinking of abortion as a personal matter, a common practice that happened everywhere, albeit quietly and in private, to a criminal offense outlawed across the country.

Speaker 9 The question is: how and why did that change happen?

Speaker 9 I'm Rand Abdel Fattah.

Speaker 11 I'm Ramteen Arab Louis.

Speaker 9 And on this episode of Through Line from NPR, we're looking back at how and why laws outlawing abortion in every state were put on the books in the first place.

Speaker 9 Coming up, a moral crusade is born.

Speaker 10 Hello, this is Emily from Lompoke, California, and you're listening to Through Line from NPR.

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Speaker 24 Part 1: The Quickening

Speaker 26 Dear Father, I did not not sail before half past eight last night as the vessel had to wait for a passenger. After we had started, a fog came up and we had to anchor in the narrows.

Speaker 26 I never was out in such rough weather in my life. On deck nearly all the time, and yet was not so sick as I was the other day.

Speaker 11 In 1849, when he was 19 years old, Horatio Storrs sailed from Boston to the wilds of Labrador, Canada on a research expedition alongside a naturalist, an expert in the natural world.

Speaker 11 They were interested in the process of reproduction, which they hoped to learn more about by studying the embryos of birds and fish.

Speaker 26 Hundreds of fish are strewed on the shore among which I notice menhaden, herring, goose fish, smooth and prickly.

Speaker 11 It was the early days of embryology, a branch of biology focused on prenatal development of embryos and fetuses.

Speaker 11 Charles Darwin, a naturalist himself, would soon publish his theory of evolution, drawing a direct line between man and beast.

Speaker 11 Horatio Storr was fascinated by all of it, embryos, nature, the circle of life.

Speaker 11 So when he got back home to Boston, he decided to enroll in medical school, following in his father's footsteps, who was a doctor who specialized in obstetrics, a modernizing field of medicine focused around childbirth.

Speaker 21 It was a time in which there was the burgeoning professionalization of obstetrics by white men of medicine.

Speaker 11 This is Michelle Goodwin, a professor of law at Georgetown Law.

Speaker 11 She's written a lot about the legal history of abortion, including policing the womb, invisible women, and the criminalization of motherhood.

Speaker 21 These are the people who were leading the way in terms of the professionalization of this new thing, obstetrics. And at the same time, they were articulating their insecurities and really

Speaker 21 a level of high disregard for midwives.

Speaker 11 There are different theories on why some doctors began to get interested in childbirth. Some historians believe it was a money grab.

Speaker 11 If you delivered the baby, the family would call you back for all the falls and fevers that came after that.

Speaker 9 Others believe these doctors genuinely thought they could make childbirth safer for women. In the early 1800s, around 500 in every 100,000 births ended in the death of the mother.

Speaker 9 Today, that number has dropped by 95%.

Speaker 9 So it was a lot more deadly then. And doctors like Horatio Storer thought they were helping women at a time when women didn't have much of a say.

Speaker 9 But women didn't necessarily want their help.

Speaker 9 For tens of thousands of years.

Speaker 20 Childbirth and pregnancy was all in the domain of women.

Speaker 9 Historian Leslie Regan again.

Speaker 20 Midwives delivered babies, and they did it surrounded by

Speaker 20 her friends, her mother, her sister, potentially her daughters, neighbors.

Speaker 20 There was a crowd of women involved in the delivery along with the midwife.

Speaker 9 But in the early 1800s, as more doctors,

Speaker 20 doctor equaled male, entered the delivery room, which is in the woman's, you know, in her own home, in her own bedroom, or her mother's bedroom.

Speaker 9 That began to shift a millennia-old dynamic. And as you can imagine, having a man in the room suddenly introduced some awkwardness.

Speaker 20 Especially a brand new doctor, sometimes they've never seen a childbirth at all.

Speaker 9 New doctors like Horatio Storr.

Speaker 20 So they could be coming in and they're surrounded by older women who know what's happening.

Speaker 20 And there are these stories in doctors' diaries of,

Speaker 20 you know, they've they've been taught you need to shave the woman's pubic hair, you know, for sanitation before you deliver the baby. And they pull out that shaver and they're kicked out of the room.

Speaker 20 They're like, you are out of here. You're not doing this.

Speaker 9 Storr and his fellow specialists in women's health didn't just face skepticism from women in those delivery rooms. Other doctors also looked down on them.

Speaker 21 Because as you think about it, they were entering a profession where nearly 100% of it had been done by women. More than 50% of that had been done by black women.

Speaker 9 Some even referred to the specialty as man-midwifery. It was a time when modern medicine was still in its early days.
There were no antibiotics, no pregnancy tests, no ultrasounds.

Speaker 9 People didn't really go to hospitals. C-sections were rarely done and even more rarely successful.

Speaker 11 Not to mention, some considered it improper, even offensive, for a male doctor to perform a pelvic exam, especially as the field of medicine was still trying to establish itself as a bona fide profession, mainly in the United States and Europe.

Speaker 11 For the most part, up until the 1870s in the U.S., there were no laws regulating who was a doctor. Then, some states began passing medical licensing laws.
More medical schools opened up.

Speaker 11 And in 1847, a small group of doctors started the American Medical Association, the AMA.

Speaker 20 They explicitly do not include women and African Americans are not part of their medical profession.

Speaker 28 Chapter 1, of the duties of physicians to their patients and of the obligations of patients to their physicians.

Speaker 11 And they laid out an elaborate code of ethics.

Speaker 28 Physicians are enabled to exhibit the close connection between hygiene and morals. Physicians, as conservative.

Speaker 11 Despite their best efforts, the AMA wasn't having much luck convincing people to take them seriously.

Speaker 11 The editor of the Cincinnati Medical Observer described physicians as a body of jealous, quarrelsome men whose chief delight is in the annoyance and ridicule of each other.

Speaker 9 By the time Horatio Storr came along in the 1850s, they were desperate for ideas about how to make their profession more respectable. And Storr set his sights on abortion.

Speaker 9 Just as women had overseen childbirth for most of human history, they'd also been on the front lines of ending unwanted pregnancies, of carrying out abortions.

Speaker 9 But in early America, they wouldn't have been using the term abortion. At the time, it was referred to as restoring the menses, trying to get your period again.

Speaker 20 You know, taking herbs, taking teas, riding horses, falling downstairs, trying, trying to get their menses back it was considered acceptable for women to restore their menses up until the moment of quickening when they felt quickening when they felt movement which for some women doesn't occur until the fifth month of a pregnancy so people didn't wrestle with this as a moral or ethical or even a legal question

Speaker 19 if a woman engaged in that practice before about the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy.

Speaker 9 There were no laws in place to prevent abortions before quickening.

Speaker 19 And so the conception of when life began really began at the moment of quickening.

Speaker 9 By some estimates, in the late 19th century, around 2 million abortions were performed each year, which means the number of abortions per capita was several times higher than it is today.

Speaker 9 Keep in mind, birth control options were very limited then, so there was less you could do to prevent a pregnancy in the first place.

Speaker 20 You know, quickening is recognized, and the law and churches and, you know, the general community understands that this is in women's purview in terms of what's going on with their bodies.

Speaker 20 They know their bodies.

Speaker 9 In other words, it was your call as the woman to say when or if you felt movement.

Speaker 19 So I think one thing that people misunderstand about the opposition to abortion is that people assume that there's always been a vibrant religious or moral opposition to abortion.

Speaker 19 And that, in fact, that's actually relatively recent. It's not something rooted in ancient history.

Speaker 9 This is Carissa Haugeberg. I'm an associate professor of history at Tulane University and author of the book, Women Against Abortion, Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the 20th Century.

Speaker 19 The question is: how does this go from being a personal private decision, either among women or between couples, to one that the state becomes invested in.

Speaker 9 This question brings us back to Madame Rostell, the so-called abortionist of Fifth Avenue.

Speaker 9 Get your morning paper. We all about it.

Speaker 20 Madame Rostell, female physician, office and residence 148 Greenwich Street between Cortland and Liberty, where she can be consulted with the strictest confidence on complaints incidental to the female frame.

Speaker 11 Years before Horatio Storr started building up his name in medicine, advertisements for Madame Rostell's services filled the papers.

Speaker 11 $5 for a packet of preventative powder, $1 for female monthly pills. And if those didn't work, she offered surgical abortions.
$20 for poor women, $100 for the rich.

Speaker 11 She called herself a doctor, just like many others in the business did.

Speaker 20 Dr. Dow advertised Dr.
Carswell, Sleeping Lucy in Vermont.

Speaker 11 They were all creating a persona, a brand, like Madame Rostell.

Speaker 11 She arrived in New York City from England in 1831 with her husband and newborn baby. Back then, she went by Anne Troz Summers.
But within months, her husband died of fever and she was left on her own.

Speaker 11 Looking around, she saw that the marketplace for helping women prevent and end pregnancies was thriving. So she changed her name to Madame Rostell and opened up shop.

Speaker 9 The pills sold in this marketplace turned traditional folk remedies that had been around for centuries into commercial products. They didn't always work and sometimes produced harmful side effects.

Speaker 9 Some women died.

Speaker 19 The American health marketplace in general was kind of dangerous. People were routinely sending away for herbal remedies to cure all matter of maladies.

Speaker 9 Some states began passing poison control laws.

Speaker 19 It was a desire to protect women from ingesting poisons that might harm them.

Speaker 9 Madame Rostel and others began to be charged under these laws, but the penalties were never too harsh.

Speaker 9 And though it earned Madame Rostel some critics in the papers, she continued to celebrate her abortion business loudly, living a life of luxury.

Speaker 11 1847, The Sunday Dispatch, New York City.

Speaker 30 Madame Rostel is showy enough for a princess. She likes fine carriages, handsome horses, and expensive living.
Her pew is one of the pleasantest in a very fashionable church.

Speaker 30 She has fortified herself too strongly ever to be overthrown.

Speaker 11 At that point, no one, least of all Madame Rostell herself, believed her reign would ever end.

Speaker 9 But those poison control laws were just the start of a moral tide that was sweeping the country.

Speaker 26 It has been said that misery loves companionship. This is nowhere more manifest than in the histories of criminal abortion.

Speaker 9 And it would lay the foundation for a campaign to make abortion not only immoral, but illegal. A campaign that would eventually take down Madame Rostel and the entire abortion marketplace.

Speaker 9 A campaign led by Horatio Storer.

Speaker 26 If we had proved the existence of fetal life before quickening has taken place or can take place,

Speaker 26 We are compelled to believe unjustifiable abortion always a crime.

Speaker 11 Coming up, Horatio Storr launches the Physicians Crusade against abortion.

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Speaker 11 this is Tobias Dwyer from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and you're listening to Through Line from NPR.

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Speaker 3 Part 2.

Speaker 11 A Century of Criminalization.

Speaker 26 The moral guilt of criminal abortion depends entirely upon the real and essential nature of the act.

Speaker 26 It is the intentional destruction of a child within its parent, and physicians are now agreed from actual and various proof that the child is alive from the moment of conception.

Speaker 9 In 1860, governors of every single state in the U.S. received this letter from the recently established American Medical Association.

Speaker 26 The evil to society of this crime is evident from the fact that its instances in this country are now to be counted by hundreds of thousands.

Speaker 9 But there was really only one guy holding the pen.

Speaker 19 Horatio Storer.

Speaker 9 Carissa Haugeberg again, who studied the formation of the anti-abortion movement.

Speaker 19 Basically, he ghost wrote a letter from the president of the AMA, so it looked like it was coming from the president, but Storr was actually the one who wrote it, saying that the AMA opposes abortion.

Speaker 19 And he used the language of morality.

Speaker 26 In reality, there is little difference between the immorality by which a man forsakes his home for an occasional visit to a house of prostitution, that he may preserve his wife from the chance of pregnancy, and the immorality by which that wife brings herself willfully to destroy the living fruit of her womb.

Speaker 9 The letter was pivotal to what historians call the physician's crusade against abortion. And Storer was making a few key arguments for why abortion should be illegal across the country.

Speaker 9 First, he introduced a new idea.

Speaker 26 The child is alive from the moment of conception.

Speaker 9 That life began at conception. Remember, up till now, people generally agreed that life began when a woman could actually feel life move inside her, at quickening.
But that wasn't enough for Storer.

Speaker 9 He campaigned on a moral argument that also tapped into the racial fears of the moment.

Speaker 9 Fears that would eventually inspire a pseudo-scientific field of, quote, racial improvement and planned breeding of the population.

Speaker 21 American eugenics.

Speaker 9 These racial fears would inspire forced sterilization programs to decrease certain populations.

Speaker 9 Whereas Storer's anti-abortion campaign was trying to increase other populations by focusing on Protestant white women.

Speaker 9 Because elite Protestant white women were often the ones going to people like Madame Rostel, and people like Horatio Storer were realizing that that had consequences.

Speaker 19 The birth rate for Protestant white women had been declining over the course of the 19th century.

Speaker 19 So he had fears of what were commonly, what was commonly referred to as race suicide, that the Anglo-stock wasn't going to replenish itself fast enough to keep up with the swells of new immigrants to the United States.

Speaker 20 And who is going to have power and populate this country and populate the Great Plains and the Great West? Well, it is going to be Chinese migrants.

Speaker 20 It's going to be African Americans, newly freed people, and Catholics. They are not the ones using abortion.
It's our,

Speaker 20 you know, Yankee women who are using abortion, trying to get into medical school, trying to do politics when they should be at home having babies and taking care of them.

Speaker 21 They began to say we need white women to use their loins because they're concerned about the blackening and the browning of what is now what at that point became the United States.

Speaker 21 And this real concern that when black people become free,

Speaker 21 what will this mean for white people?

Speaker 21 And white women become a key to that.

Speaker 9 So part of Sora's thinking was that criminalizing abortion would help rebalance the scales of who was being born into this country. But there was more to his strategy.

Speaker 9 He saw this as a way to finally knock out the competition. Midwives and people like Madame Rurcel.

Speaker 19 And so if the AMA could wrest control over the marketplace of abortion,

Speaker 19 it would be lucrative to this growing cadre of university-educated, mostly male physicians who are beginning to specialize in things like obstetrics and gynecology.

Speaker 11 So midwives were slandered in this campaign.

Speaker 21 Described as unsanitary, unclean, as unmoral, and as clueless as the mothers themselves.

Speaker 20 Saying women do not know, they don't know when they quicken and really makes fun of women's own sensations and knowledges and says, you know, some of them quicken at one month, some of them never quicken at all, and then they have a baby.

Speaker 26 They may very constantly be recognized by the physician in cases where no sensation is felt by the mother.

Speaker 20 So there's this scoffing at women's knowledge saying, this is a sin, this is murder, you're killing children.

Speaker 26 By the moral law, the willful killing of a human being at any stage of its existence is murder.

Speaker 20 And the general public and women don't get it. They don't know that.
And we need to change the laws.

Speaker 9 So to help people get it, Storer wrote articles, books, reports, speeches, all to make his views on abortion and women clear.

Speaker 9 In one lecture called The Origins of Insanity in Women, he advocated for ovaryctomies for women who, quote, have become habitually thievish, profane, or obscene, despondent or self-indulgent, shrewish or fatuous.

Speaker 13 The solution, as he saw it, remove the cause.

Speaker 9 A woman's reproductive organs.

Speaker 19 He was really hostile to women.

Speaker 9 And that hostility was starting to gain traction. A few years into the campaign, some states began to pass laws outlawing or restricting abortion.
Perhaps the harshest was in Connecticut in 1860.

Speaker 9 The law got rid of the quickening rule and made abortion a crime for which the abortionist and the woman getting the abortion could be fined and jailed.

Speaker 9 And over the next few decades, most states across the country would adopt similar laws, thanks in part to another campaign that was going on at the same time that was getting even more attention.

Speaker 19 It was led by a Union Army Civil War veteran named Anthony Comstock, who's well known for leading the anti-birth control crusade of the 19th century.

Speaker 9 Anthony Comstock was a descendant of some of the earliest Puritans in New England.

Speaker 9 He took that ancestry to heart and went on to work with the Young Men's Christian Association, the YMCA, in New York City and founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Speaker 9 And he dedicated his life to exactly that, suppressing vice.

Speaker 11 In 1873, Comstock began lobbying Congress to pass anti-obscenity laws.

Speaker 11 There had been a rise of prostitution and new forms of birth control like diaphragms and rubber condoms, all of which triggered a powerful backlash, a backlash that culminated in the Comstock Law.

Speaker 21 The criminalization of sending materials through the mail that could be seen as obscene.

Speaker 12 That no obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of an indecent character or any article article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion nor any article or thing intended or adapted the law made it illegal to mail sex toys pornography contraception abortion drugs or even information about contraception and abortion

Speaker 21 including some medical books that had pictures of anatomy right it's just how deep it went

Speaker 11 but here's the thing Comstock conflated birth control with abortion.

Speaker 11 He saw no difference between the two, which meant that abortion was wrapped up into this new law, making it a federal offense to send or order material about abortion by mail, with punishment of up to $5,000 in fines, which is over $110,000 today and up to 10 years in prison.

Speaker 11 The law was the first of its kind in the Western world.

Speaker 9 Between Comstock's laws and Horatio Storr's crusade, by 1880, every single state had a law outlawing abortion on the books. These laws launched a century of criminalization.

Speaker 20 So in the terms of the way the laws are written, there is always an exception written into the laws that allow for medical professionals, for doctors, to perform abortions if they, in their medical judgment, believe it is necessary.

Speaker 20 to save a woman's life or to save her health. This is clearly written from the perspective of a specific group of the medical profession, and they're really claiming abortion as theirs.

Speaker 20 It is the procedure that doctors can perform if they believe it is medically necessary.

Speaker 20 And that medically necessary is not defined in the law, but it does mean that they can kind of control this and also say, you know, other people, midwives, you know, Madame Ristell, immigrants, you know, bad people are doing this procedure and it's immoral.

Speaker 20 And now it's illegal.

Speaker 9 Unless it's done by us, doctors.

Speaker 11 In the end, Horatio Storer and the AMA's campaign against abortion, aided by Anthony Comstock's anti-contraception campaign, was a success.

Speaker 11 And although not all doctors agreed with or followed the new laws, midwives and entrepreneurs like Madame Rostell were still sidelined as male gynecologists and obstetricians took over.

Speaker 11 But they didn't just lose business, they were in danger now that their very livelihoods were illegal.

Speaker 11 Things were especially dire for Madame Rostel since she had been so public and bold about her services.

Speaker 11 Her clientele were mainly upper-class white women, the women's store believed she'd be having more kids. All eyes were on her as these laws took hold.
And Comstock made it his mission to end her.

Speaker 9 In 1878, he rang her doorbell on East 52nd Street, pretending that he was a married man seeking an abortion for his wife who already had too many children and wasn't in good enough health to birth another.

Speaker 9 She sold him some pills and he was on his way. But the next day, Comstock returned with a police officer who arrested Ristell.

Speaker 9 As always, Ristell went to the press.

Speaker 27 He's in this nasty detective business. There are a number of little doctors who are in the same business behind him.

Speaker 27 They think if they can get me in trouble and out of the way, they can make a fortune.

Speaker 27 If the public are determined to push this matter, they will have a good laugh when they learn the nature of the terrible items of the preventative prescriptions.

Speaker 13 Of course, if there's a trial, it will all come out.

Speaker 11 But there was never a trial. Ristell became distressed.
She paced around her house, asking her servants why she was persecuted time and time again.

Speaker 11 And on the morning of the day she was supposed to appear in court, one of her chambermaids walked into her bathroom to find her dead in her bathtub. She had slit her own throat.

Speaker 9 When Comstock found out, he took out his file on her and wrote:

Speaker 9 A bloody ending to a bloody life.

Speaker 11 As for Horatio Storer, he co-founded the Gynecological Society of Boston, which focused on diseases that affected women and reproductive health, and came to be known as a pioneer in the field of OBGYN, obstetrics, and gynecology.

Speaker 21 When we think about this,

Speaker 21 Is there any wonder why for so long medicine looked white and male in the United States?

Speaker 21 What explains that? It's certainly not because women aren't intellectually curious about medicine.

Speaker 21 It's not because women don't know how to read books.

Speaker 21 It is because the American Medical Association, through the tools of all of this time, very specifically, very specifically, made sure that women would be cut out.

Speaker 9 Coming up, abortions go underground.

Speaker 9 Hi, my name is Fenn Corso. I'm a teacher from Tampa, Florida, and this is Drew Line from NPR.

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Speaker 24 Part 3: Into the Shadows.

Speaker 20 I still remember the sound.

Speaker 9 When Joan Lester was 19 years old, she found herself in a dark room with a doctor whose name she didn't know.

Speaker 20 I don't even know if he was a gynecologist.

Speaker 9 Alone at midnight, getting an illegal abortion. What happened next was really common and really graphic.

Speaker 20 So he told me to lie down on the table, you know, take my pants off first. I lay down on this table.

Speaker 20 He inserted a curette, which is basically a razor, and began to scrape the inside of my uterus, to scrape out the fetus.

Speaker 20 And I still remember the sound.

Speaker 20 In addition to the pain, I don't think he gave me any painkillers.

Speaker 20 And so I began to moan, and then I think I screamed.

Speaker 20 He clamped his hand over my mouth. He said, shut up.

Speaker 20 And that's mostly all I remember about it.

Speaker 9 At the end of the procedure, the doctor gave her a couple of towels.

Speaker 20 Blood was just coming down my legs, and I remember soaking through the one or two towels that I had.

Speaker 20 It hurt like hell.

Speaker 20 I was probably crying.

Speaker 9 A few weeks later, Joan was still in a lot of pain. So she went to the closest hospital looking for answers, looking for help.

Speaker 20 I got to the hospital emergency room, and there was a doctor there who was the admitting doctor.

Speaker 9 She told him she'd had an abortion.

Speaker 20 And there I am, writhing in pain.

Speaker 9 When suddenly his whole demeanor changed.

Speaker 20 And he said, you're an abomination. This is God's punishment

Speaker 20 to you. for your sin for what you've done and you're never going to have children your tubes are going to be sealed up because you have this huge pelvic inflammatory infection.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 he was just screaming at me.

Speaker 9 Joan was admitted into the hospital and put on antibiotics. If she'd waited, she might have gone into septic shock when an infection causes your blood pressure to drop to life-threatening levels.

Speaker 9 Over the next week, she began to recover.

Speaker 20 And I have to say that this

Speaker 20 was probably not one of the most extreme examples of what happened to women. They were just all kind of horror stories because we were just completely vulnerable because we had done something illegal.

Speaker 20 And,

Speaker 20 you know, we basically had no rights.

Speaker 9 For decades after Horatio Storr and the AMA got those laws on the books in every state, Women continued to quietly seek out abortions in the private practices of doctors who disagreed with or simply worked outside outside of the laws, which there were plenty of.

Speaker 9 Those doctors rarely faced criminal charges unless a woman died.

Speaker 9 It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that the horror stories of botched illegal abortions, like Joan Lester's, began skyrocketing, a byproduct of a changing world.

Speaker 18 The hospitals, designed to serve thousands at a time, are equipped with the most modern devices and specialists and expert technicians.

Speaker 20 By World War II, everybody is in the hospital.

Speaker 18 John Rogers Jr., white, six brown. Mother's name, Clara.

Speaker 20 90-95% of the entire population goes to hospital to deliver babies.

Speaker 18 That's exactly the reverse of the figures when John Sr. was born.

Speaker 11 There had been a revolution in medicine. Things like x-rays, antibiotics, and sterile surgeries made hospitals important like never before.
Childbirth and abortions were theoretically safer than ever.

Speaker 20 And so abortion too is increasingly going to be done in the hospital. And this this really changes things.

Speaker 11 Many OBGYN doctors moved into hospitals where they had a lot more oversight and hospital administrators who are worried about violating state laws and getting sued formed abortion review committees that would review whether an abortion was medically justifiable or not.

Speaker 11 And they made it really hard for a woman's abortion request to get approved.

Speaker 19 Women are subject to multiple exams, usually by both psychiatrists, obstetricians, and then often three other physicians. This is an era when many women don't have health insurance.

Speaker 19 Certainly when there aren't federal programs to help women pay for these services.

Speaker 11 Certified LBGYN doctors who would have done abortions before were terrified of getting caught now, especially because this shift in medicine collided with another massive change.

Speaker 29 Babies all over the map. Babies, babies, baby, babies, babies.

Speaker 19 After World War II, we had the baby boom and there was enormous pressure put on American women to have children.

Speaker 9 During the Second World War, women had staffed jobs in factories and other parts of society as the men went off to battle. When the men came back,

Speaker 9 women were pressured to return into the home and to have children.

Speaker 20 Get married, have children, and live with a white picket pets.

Speaker 9 And abortion was at odds with this.

Speaker 9 City officials, motivated by the social messaging of the time and looking for ways to boost their public profile in the face of growing racial tensions and accusations of corruption, begin enforcing these laws that have been on the books.

Speaker 20 They start to go after people who've been practicing for 10, 20 years and they raid them.

Speaker 19 So we see an explosion of the illegal marketplace for abortion in the 1940s and 1950s.

Speaker 20 You're thrown underground and into the shadows.

Speaker 19 As the illegal marketplace flourishes, a whole host of people fill that vacuum.

Speaker 9 Some doctors risked losing their license to practice, risked going to jail, and continued providing abortions to women in secret.

Speaker 19 But the vast majority of women sought to self-abort.

Speaker 20 I heard of people throwing themselves downstairs or drinking Clorox or, you know, various kinds of poisons.

Speaker 21 There were women who died in motel rooms sitting on towel on top of clumps of towels. People coming home and finding daughters dead in bathtubs bleeding out.

Speaker 21 Coming home and finding wives on the top of dining room tables, having used hangers and things like that.

Speaker 33 Many women of all social classes, many women of color were getting abortions. The real story here is the difference in outcomes.

Speaker 11 If you had the means, which usually meant you were an upper middle class white woman, you could pay off someone with a little more training to do the abortion.

Speaker 33 You know, it was African-American women who were most likely to end up in the clutches of the so-called back alley butchers.

Speaker 11 This is Carol Jaffe.

Speaker 33 I'm a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

Speaker 11 It's hard to pinpoint exactly how many illegal abortions were being carried out in this period. Estimates range from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year.
There was a cone of silence around it.

Speaker 11 Many women were too afraid to talk about their experiences, fearing both legal and social consequences.

Speaker 21 We have to remember what it was like in the 1950s and the 1960s and the shame that was brought about by being a single mother. Women were not supposed to have babies out of wedlock.

Speaker 21 They were not supposed to divorce their husbands if they experienced domestic violence. I mean, it was legal legal to rape your wife.

Speaker 21 So in the United States, we're talking about a time in which state's laws protected men who raped their wives.

Speaker 9 More and more women like Joan Lester were showing up in emergency rooms with infections and injuries caused by botched abortions.

Speaker 20 5, 10, 20 a day,

Speaker 20 hundreds coming in on the weekends.

Speaker 9 Doctors and medical students were scrambling to help them all.

Speaker 20 And they're holding their hands while they bleed and die.

Speaker 20 And this justice, for many people, is intolerable.

Speaker 9 Abortions, if done in sterile conditions by a trained professional, were rarely deadly at this point. But the illegal marketplace was creating an epidemic.

Speaker 33 So

Speaker 20 that drives a lot of doctors to

Speaker 20 support the decriminalization because they personally know what the results are and they see it as a public health problem.

Speaker 11 Doctors teamed up with like-minded lawyers and set out to reform abortion laws at the state level.

Speaker 20 And the hope is, you know, these doctors will be able to perform more of the abortions that they think are necessary.

Speaker 11 In cases where women had been raped or the mental or physical health of the fetus was at risk. A group of doctors had been responsible for getting laws against abortion rights on the books.

Speaker 11 And now doctors were on the other side of the fight, pushing to get those same laws off the books.

Speaker 11 More than a dozen states passed reform laws in the late 1960s and early 70s, and four states legalized abortion outright. New York, Alaska, Washington, and Hawaii.

Speaker 19 Almost immediately as states revised their laws, anti-abortion activists began to mobilize.

Speaker 19 And most of them were Catholic. So they were really the only, you know, stalwart opponents to abortion.

Speaker 11 On and off, for centuries, the Catholic Church had declared all abortion murder. And in the 1960s, a movement began to form around that idea.

Speaker 9 At this time, as the movement is emerging, would they have been self-identifying as anti-abortion or pro-life?

Speaker 19 They would have used the language, the descriptor pro-life. Catholics who were coming out of anti-war activism, civil rights activism, anti-nuclear proliferation activism.

Speaker 19 They believed that life should be protected from conception to death. So they opposed the death penalty.
They supported a more generous welfare state to enable women to be able to support families.

Speaker 11 They saw all of this as a part of a broader movement to protect life at all stages, a quote, pro-life movement.

Speaker 9 But outside of this Catholic opposition, the pushback to these reform laws was minimal.

Speaker 9 Mainline Protestant institutions even came out in support of expanding access to abortion, seeing firsthand the toll of illegal abortions on women and their congregations.

Speaker 34 A new movement for women's liberation is launched and once again protesters take to the street to support their demands for total freedom economically, politically, socially.

Speaker 9 In the 1960s, the women's liberation movement began to advocate for what one organization called, quote, true equal partnership with men.

Speaker 32 Equal rights to have a job, to have respect, to not be viewed as a piece of meat. We just want what men have had all these years.

Speaker 20 Those of us like myself who were involved were just living and breathing, you know, liberation, liberation, liberation.

Speaker 9 But pretty soon, the mostly white, mostly middle-class leaders of the movement shifted their focus.

Speaker 18 What is it you're pioneering? What do you want me to say?

Speaker 35 The sexual revolution. I feel we're going into the, you know, beginning of an emotional revolution.

Speaker 9 They wanted to get rid of the shame and silence that had surrounded women's bodies and sexuality for so long.

Speaker 35 We don't just take our clothes off and say, look, I am nude, you know.

Speaker 35 It's all very natural.

Speaker 9 Abortion became a top priority for the movement. And they encouraged women to speak out about their illegal abortion stories.

Speaker 20 And it was pretty shocking. It was shocking to me.
I think it was shocking to everybody how widespread this was.

Speaker 20 Respected Respected professionals and mothers, oh my god, they had an abortion.

Speaker 20 It really changed the conversation.

Speaker 33 What's so interesting is that so much of the feminist movement of that time in general was very focused on health and was very anti-doctor. There was a tremendous critique of gynecology.

Speaker 33 You know, the image of a woman in the stirrups became sort of this emblem of female passivity and male power.

Speaker 9 And suddenly, they found themselves on the same side as these doctors,

Speaker 9 forced to work with them whether they liked it or not.

Speaker 33 I have referred to them as, quote, uneasy allies, who didn't always see eye to eye. It was a clash of style.

Speaker 9 Feminists wanted sweeping change. Some called for repeal of all laws restricting abortion.

Speaker 9 They were saying, we don't need to be told when it's appropriate to have an abortion by a doctor or anyone else. It should be a private personal decision.

Speaker 11 But some people who supported abortion rights worried that framing the issue within the context of the feminist movement and pushing a national agenda might create a backlash.

Speaker 19 So for the women who opposed abortion beginning in the late 1960s, they understood the sexual revolution as a threat, a threat to to the family, something that might cause men and women not to get married and have children in the orderly way that they should.

Speaker 19 They believed that they were suddenly being criticized as being stupid or being dupes for having that lifestyle.

Speaker 11 And there was a fear that abortion was just the beginning of the end of that lifestyle.

Speaker 19 That this is part of a moral decline wrought by the sexual revolution.

Speaker 11 Some of these women began joining the pro-life movement, a movement that was still in its infancy, a movement that was poised to enter a new era.

Speaker 29 Today, we find it the center of a gathering storm as women and men argue the question of abortion, the right to life or the woman's right to choose.

Speaker 9 In 1970, while all this was happening, A small group of lawyers took on a case in Texas.

Speaker 9 The plaintiff, a woman named Norma McCorvey, who was listed as Jane Rowe in court records to protect her identity.

Speaker 9 The defendant, Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, where Jane Rowe lived.

Speaker 9 The issue, Jane Rowe was pregnant with her third child and wanted an abortion on the grounds that it should always be a woman's right to choose.

Speaker 9 Under Texas law, abortions were only allowed when necessary to save a woman's life.

Speaker 11 By 1973, the case had made its way to the Supreme Court. Jane Rowe had already had her child, but the stakes were much higher by then.

Speaker 11 If the court sided with Jane Rowe, abortion would become legal nationwide.

Speaker 18 Good evening. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortions.
The majority in the United States.

Speaker 21 Roe v. Wade was a 7-2 opinion.

Speaker 21 Five of those seven justices

Speaker 21 who struck down laws criminalizing abortion were Republican-appointed.

Speaker 11 The court ruled that the state could not regulate abortion in the first trimester at all. Only in the third trimester, once the fetus could live outside the womb, could states ban abortion entirely.

Speaker 9 And the court stopped short of giving women total control over the decision.

Speaker 9 Quote, the attending physician in consultation with his patient is free to determine without regulation by the state that in his medical judgment, the patient's pregnancy should be terminated.

Speaker 9 Doctors remained a central part of the decision and at the heart of the issue. Still, this was a huge, sweeping change, and abortion was now legal in all 50 states.

Speaker 33 And everybody thought the problem was done.

Speaker 33 It wasn't.

Speaker 33 So what happened right after Roe?

Speaker 9 What happened right after Roe? Check out our episode, After Roe, to learn more.

Speaker 11 That's it for this week's show. I'm Ram Tina Arab Lou.

Speaker 9 I'm Randabdil Fattah, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 11 This episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence Wu.

Speaker 10 Lane Kaplan-Levinson.

Speaker 27 Julie Kane.

Speaker 2 Victor Iveez.

Speaker 10 Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini.
Casey Minor.

Speaker 11 Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

Speaker 9 Thank you to Turner Ross, Blaise Alder Ivinbrook, Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Benjamin Swift, Owen Perry, Sam Klag, Shahir Khan, Eric Liu, and Bergen Hoff for their voiceover work.

Speaker 9 And a special thanks to Deb George for her editing support.

Speaker 11 Thanks to Sarah McCammon, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grundman.

Speaker 9 This episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvy, Show Fujiwara.

Speaker 11 If you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at mpr.org.

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