In the words of historian Judith Walzer Leavitt, “Women knew that if procreation did not kill them or their babies, it could maim them for life.” In an era before modern medical procedures, the grave dangers of childbirth were widely understood. Though birth rates were high-in 1835, the average woman would give birth more than six times during her lifetime-many women wanted to limit the number of times they would have to carry and bear a child. Though reasons varied, a lack of reliable contraception, the disgrace of bearing a child outside of marriage, and the dangers of childbirth were the main reasons women terminated their pregnancies. Though the entry did not mention pregnancy or abortion by name, it did reference “promoting the monthly discharge from the uterus.”

If she owned a book like the 1855 Hand-Book of Domestic Medicine, she could have opened it to the section on “emmenagogues,” substances that provoked uterine bleeding. “It was really a decision that a woman could choose in private,” MacIvor Thompson says.Ī pregnant woman might consult with a midwife, or head to her local drug store for an over-the-counter patent medicine or douching device. However, the case centered around the men’s role in the woman’s death, not abortion per se, and such prosecutions were rare. In 1740s Connecticut, for example, prosecutors tried both a doctor and a Connecticut man for a misdemeanor in connection with the death of Sarah Grosvenor, who had died after a botched abortion. Some localities prosecuted cases involving abortions. Church officials frowned on the practice, writes Oklahoma University of Law legal historian Carla Spivack in the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, but they treated the practice as evidence of illicit or premarital sex-not as murder. In colonial America and the early days of the republic, there were no abortion laws at all. Photograph by Bill Janscha, Associated Press Before abortion law

Wade Supreme Court ruling made abortion legal nationwide.

McCorvey is better known to many as “Jane Roe,” the fictitious name she used in her historic lawsuit against the state’s anti-abortion law. Right: Norma McCorvey, 35, poses for a photograph in Terrell, Texas, on January 21, 1983.

Sarah grosvenor