Early America’s complicated history with abortion access

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade relied heavily on the argument that quote, a right to an abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation's history and traditions. Paul Solman takes a look now at that history as part of our continuing coverage of America after Roe.

• Paul Solman:

  An abortion recipe from 1748.

• Molly Farrell, English Professor:

  The recipe itself that he gives is remarkably explicit, detailed and for the time, medically accurate.

• Paul Solman:

  English professor Molly Farrell discussing a book she studied here at the American Antiquarian Society in Western Massachusetts, while researching how early Americans used numbers, published by Benjamin Franklin, the American instructor was a do it yourself guide to various life hacks for Colonial Americans.

• Molly Farrell:

  There's all different types of recipes for gleeds, for Dropsy, for fever, and I saw one that said suppression of the courses maybe it was because I myself at the time was pregnant and thinking about these things. But it connected with me like doesn't that means a missed period when the courses are suppressed?

• Paul Solman:

  So courses is menstruation. But how do we jump from that to abortion?

• Molly Farrell:

  So this was a typical parlance using the time to indicate that we're talking about pregnancy, it both uses terms like suppression of the courses that were common to other recipes for abortion.

• Paul Solman:

  To Farrell and others, the books recipe of traditional abortion inducing routes, like Pennyroyal, and then Jelica shows that the practice was is deeply rooted in American history, as opposition to it.

• Molly Farrell:

  Explicitly. This is for young, unmarried women, this is a problem that they usually have. And it says that they should not long for pretty fellows, or any other trash whatsoever, basically what got you, you know, into this mess was longing for pretty fellows.

• Paul Solman:

  Or falling for the lines delivered by printing fellows?

• Molly Farrell:

  Yes. I mean, it's remarkably explicit, actually. It's really direct.

• Paul Solman:

  Do you think that historical context has gotten enough attention in this debate?

• Scott Casper, President, American Antiquarian Society:

  I think historical context rarely gets enough attention in any debate.

• Paul Solman:

  American Antiquarian Society president Scott Caspar.

• Scott Casper:

  We might look or some might look just at a series of laws or what is or is not in laws, without looking at what's happening in popular practice in the press. What people's ideas are in culture. We forget often, that the past was just as complex and contested as our present is many people try to find in the past, what resonates with their own views in the present.

• Paul Solman:

  So a reference from 1788 and a copy of a sort of sex manual of the day that resonates for those opposed to abortion.

  Elizabeth Pope, Curator of Books and Digitized Collections: Midwives are admonished by no means to prescribe such medicines as will cause abortion though desired, which is a high degree of wickedness and may be termed murder.

• Paul Solman:

  On the other hand, that same text Aristotle's masterpiece was published many times as curator of books, Elizabeth Pope.

• Elizabeth Pope:

  So out of those more than 60 editions, only a few handful have those directions to midwives that I mentioned that describe abortion as murder, but even in that instance they do seem to be saying that midwives were providing abortions to people who had desired them.

• Paul Solman:

  Then there's the case of English woman Ann Lohman, who became a midwife known as Madame Restell. In 1839, she placed an ad in the New York Sun which read, Is it moral for parents to increase their families regardless of consequences to themselves, or the well-being of their offspring when a simple, easy, healthy and certain remedy is within our control? In 1847, Madame Restell was arrested and tried and demonized in the police Gazette and elsewhere, says graphic arts curator Lauren Hewes.

  Lauren Hewes, Curator of Graphic Arts, American Antiquarian Society: So Cartoons For example, painting Madame Restell as a very dark figure, or cartoons showing Madame Restell's offices full of pregnant women who are uneducated, who are seeking help but are in disguise, for instance, so that no one wants to know who's having abortion.

• Paul Solman:

  And yet Restell's sometimes Restealwas a busy publicly advertised practice. Are there ads for herbs or patent medicines that induce abortion?

• Lauren Hewes:

  Yes, although they don't say that they're for abortion. There are ads there for restarting the flow for managing menstruation, for general women's health, that include everything from patent medicines to herbal remedies that date back to the 17th and 18th century.

• Paul Solman:

  And these are unequivocally abortion inducing concoctions?

• Lauren Hewes:

  They would have certainly been understood as such.

• Molly Farrell:

  So this is Thomas Jefferson's notes on Virginia.

• Paul Solman:

  Jefferson chronicled Native American abortion practice.

• Molly Farrell:

  Thomas Jefferson mentions, again without any kind of judgment in his 1785 notes on the state of Virginia, that indigenous women in Virginia routinely induce abortion through the years use of particular herbs. So he mentions here the women very frequently attending the men in their parties of war and hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said therefore, they have learned to the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable.

  Here we have men writing about women doing this, and one of the frustrations that I have is that women's knowledge often doesn't get written down.

• Paul Solman:

  And what about enslaved Americans?

• Molly Farrell:

  We have testimony of enslaved black women talking about how, yes, when they would want to induce a miscarriage. They would take turpentine for example, and the enslavers knew about this and then so they would reformulate the turpentine that they use to make sure that it wouldn't work in that it actively trying to stop them because of course that would reduce the value of their property.

• Paul Solman:

  In the end, then everyone at the Antiquarian Society insisted on just one thing. History tells more than one story about abortion.

• Lauren Hewes:

  Contested now contested them.

• Paul Solman:

  Like so much else in the history of pluralistic America. For PBS News Weekend, Paul Solman.