Demonizing Abortion in America
Although abortion had been an established and largely accepted practice within American society for much of its history, by the 1840s a growing chorus of voices had arisen calling for its criminalization. Much of the public outcry focused on the figure of Madame Restell, an abortion provider in New York City who advertised her services openly in newspapers like the New York Herald and dispensed them from her fashionable three-story brownstone mansion at the corner of 5th Avenue and 52nd Street. Restell’s success and public visibility—she was reported to ride around town in a luxurious four-horse carriage—made her an easy target for anti-abortion campaigners and provided them with a frame on which to hang the stereotype of the evil female abortionist. In the 1850s, Restell attracted the attention of the recently formed American Medical Society and became the object of its campaign, led by Dr. Horatio Storer, to end abortion in America.
New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million
George Lippard
Cincinnati: H. M. Rulison, 1854
George Lippard’s book is one of the many dime novels published during the mid-19th century that uses the trope of the “evil female abortionist” to generate moral outrage among its readers. Using the very thinnest of veils—the historical Restell appears here as the fictional “Madame Resimer”—Lippard expresses his horror not merely over Resimer’s work as an abortion provider but over the fact that she is wealthy, operates out of a mansion in one of New York’s most fashionable neighborhoods, and, perhaps worst of all, does so openly and without apology. Lippard’s novel traffics in a number of popular stereotypes of female abortion providers, including suggestions that they are motivated by greed and lack a proper sense of shame.
“Puck to Nemesis” in Puck
April 10, 1878
New York: Puck Publishing Company
In this 1878 cartoon from Joseph Keppler’s popular satirical magazine Puck, the magazine’s eponymous character addresses the goddess Nemesis, the deity tasked with avenging crime and punishing the proud. Gesturing toward the headquarters of two of New York’s prominent newspapers—the New York Herald and the German-language New York Staats-Zeitung), Puck urges Nemesis to continue her vengeful work, claiming that “these proud edifices have helped to rear that one”—namely, the 5th Avenue mansion and home from which Restell performed abortions. Puck’s stance against newspapers that advertised abortion services aligned it with the aims of anti-abortion campaigners like Anthony Comstock.
The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life
Ned Buntline
New York: Berford & Co., 1848
Like Lippard, Buntline sets his novel in New York and uses the historical Madame Restell as the model for his story’s cartoon villain—an abortion provider named Caroline Sitstill. But for the shock and horror of Lippard’s novel, Buntline substitutes misogynistic invective and overt sermonizing. Referred to earlier as “an abortion of her own sex, [and] one whom it would be blasphemy to call a woman,” Sitstill/Restell is warned here that there is “a warm berth waiting” for her in the afterlife. Novels like Buntline’s gave rise to a popular stereotype of female abortion providers—and later of women who procured abortions for themselves—as dangerously unnatural creatures, traitors to women’s natural maternal instincts.