For most of the country’s history, abortion before quickening (the moment at about twenty weeks when a woman could detect fetal movement) had been accepted. But at the time the Girl Reporter wrote, laws were growing more restrictive and knowledge of abortion techniques more actively suppressed. This crackdown was partially the result of the fact that throughout the nineteenth century, birth rates were declining and abortion was on the rise. Increased population density in cities allowed remedies to spread by word of mouth. The printing boom resulted in mass-produced anatomically informative pamphlets, magazines, and journals, giving women information they needed to control their fertility. Some estimates put the figure as high as one in five pregnancies in some areas ending in abortion, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, while early in the 1800s, the rate was closer to one in twenty-five. Resolve built to shut down the practice: in 1800, no states had antiabortion laws, while in 1900, all but one did.
And over the course of the century, it would become clear that regulating women’s reproductive options—whether by laws, shame, or misinformation—was intimately related to regulating their speech. Censorship of abortion discussion specifically and women’s health information in general created the need for journalists like the Girl Reporter, who wrote about female bodies frankly, and the hunger to hear what they had to say.
The first wave of antiabortion legislation appeared in the late 1820s and 1830s. In 1828 in New York, providing medicine or an operation that produced abortion before quickening became a misdemeanor and after quickening became a felony—unless the procedure would save the life of the mother or had been signed off on by two physicians. At the time, those with rigorous training who published in the top-tier journals considered themselves the real medical experts. They were attempting to distinguish their practices from both quacks with pieces of paper from diploma mills and from midwives. Midwives often had the most experience with childbirth, and women often preferred them, stealing what doctors felt was their rightful business. But midwives often had no formal training at all. (And formal training would not have been available to them, as most medical schools did not admit women.) Antiabortion legislation was one way to make sure business flowed into the “legitimate” doctors’ offices.
In addition to agitating for antiabortion laws to guarantee their market share, early nineteenth-century physicians trafficked in misinformation to undermine the authority of midwives. Maintaining patient ignorance was part of their strategy. They suggested that drugs used to cause abortions didn’t work. They disparaged savin and pennyroyal—known to every midwife as abortifacients—as “useless” or “dangerous,” writing that no medicines could safely provide that kind of relief. Enslaved women used cotton root to control fertility, doctors observed, and they searched for medicines that would stop a cotton-root-caused abortion and force the pregnancy to go through. (Women who read medical journals also took note and requested cotton root from their pharmacists.)
Newspapers supported the physicians’ campaign with tales of evil abortionists and innocents taken in. The Daily Commercial Advertiser in Buffalo in 1837 featured the story of a Chicago woman, pregnant by her brother-in-law, who went to a Michigan hotel for an abortion, only to then be poisoned by her sister. “They have both been excommunicated from the church,” the paper noted. The same year the Long-Island Star covered a doctor who performed an abortion on his lover, killing her. In 1843, the Courier reprinted an article from the New York Sun describing “the infernal plot” of a pastor who slept with a young woman in his church and then gave her drugs to cause an abortion. And as reporters and editorial pages involved themselves in these campaigns, abortion—its fascination, its hidden nature, its ubiquity—became intertwined with the development of journalism.
The same papers where these stories appeared were often funded by ads for abortion-causing medicines. Their financial security depended on the procedure they pretended to despise. For example, among offers of quills, coal, and beauty potions, readers of the New-York Tribune in 1841 could be tempted by “Genuine French Female Monthly Pills” promising “astonishing success in cases of irregular and obstructed” menstruation or the “Female’s Friend,” designed for “relieving and removing all those complaints peculiar to females.” The New York Herald featured ads for “Dr. Van Hambert’s Female Renovating Pills, from Germany” which noted, slyly, “They must not be taken during pregnancy, as they will produce abortion.”
Even stories that appeared about something else entirely often had abortion at their root; the issue was everywhere. In 1841, Mary Rogers, a young New York woman who worked behind the counter selling tobacco in a store in Lower Manhattan, so pretty she’d been dubbed “the beautiful cigar girl,” disappeared one Sunday afternoon. She was found dead, several days later, floating in the Hudson. In one of the last sightings of Rogers alive, an innkeeper said she’d been drinking lemonade with several young men. The coroner determined she’d been raped and strangled. Who could have done it? A lover from the boardinghouse her mother kept? A marauding gang? The Herald, known (and condemned by competitor journals) for frank descriptions of bodies and sex, embraced and ran with the story. Not long after the corpse was recovered and the Herald printed a detailed coroner’s report, a petticoat, shawl, and handkerchief with “Mary” on it were found in the woods.
With graphic descriptions of the corpse, the Herald and other papers grasped the potential of mysteries implied by the body of a dead, young, beautiful girl, the same potential exploited by the Jack
