Politicising Abortion in the United States
In 19th-century America abortion was weaponised as part of a culture war.
Lizzie and Frank Ward started seeing each other in early 1860. They went for walks in the northern Pennsylvania woods, attended church socials, and kissed. As Frank joyfully noted in his diary in March 1860: ‘Closely held in loving arms we lay, embraced, and kissed all night.’ When Frank enlisted in the Union army two years later, they quickly married and he went off to the front. Remarkably, Frank also recorded that Lizzie ended a pregnancy early in their married life, noting ‘she was going to have a child, but she took an effective remedy’. This and other entries in his youthful journal were published decades later, after his death. In the late 19th century he had become well known as a founder of the new discipline of sociology.
Frank was wounded in the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863 and returned to the small town of Towanda to convalesce. After a few months, he resumed military service as part of the so-called Invalid Corps, becoming a clerk in an army hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, where he was soon able to arrange a position for Lizzie as well, supervising the laundresses.
The couple’s married life truly began while they were living in the hospital. A week after she arrived, they played checkers in the evening and ‘she defeated me every time’. On other evenings Lizzie worked on her French and Frank his Greek. Low wages and wartime inflation made life difficult. Frank bought a frying pan for $10 (almost £200 in today’s value) and rented it out to other families for 15 cents a week. He boasted in his journal that he had already recouped seven dollars of the purchase price. They sold some of their rations – a ten-day supply included ‘coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, ham, salt pork, and four loaves of bread’ – and Lizzie took in washing.
Lizzie became pregnant early in 1864, but their hand-to-mouth existence in the hospital was no place to rear an infant. Without telling her husband, she acquired some medicine from Martha Gee, the wife of another Invalid Corps soldier at the hospital, and terminated the pregnancy. Frank only found out about the abortion when Lizzie contracted a sore throat a few days later, and she told the doctor about it. All three were more worried about the sore throat. If Frank was troubled by Lizzie’s decision, and by the fact he had not been consulted, he did not mention it in his diary. Nor was the physician bothered; his attention was focused on her throat, lancing a swelling to release pus. Such lack of concern, even in states such as Virginia where abortion was illegal, was typical of the way most Americans – doctors and their patients – thought about abortion at the time.
In the mid-19th century, American doctors struggled in an unregulated market. Medical training might mean anything from three months in a storefront medical school to years at university. Graduates competed with water-cure, homeopathy, and herbal medicine practitioners. In 1859 a handful of the graduates of elite medical schools, spearheaded by Harvard-trained Horatio Robinson Storer, started an anti-abortion campaign, seeking a high moral ground with which to distinguish themselves from the competition. It is not clear why Storer chose this issue, although developments in embryology had begun to problematise the longstanding distinction between abortion before quickening (when a pregnant woman first felt a foetus move) and after. In those few states where abortion was illegal, such as Virginia, abortion before quickening was usually only a misdemeanour and rarely prosecuted. Storer began a letter-writing campaign to state legislatures, and by 1880 all states and territories had criminalised abortion.
State legislators were probably more persuaded by social than medical arguments. Nativism, the belief that the ‘wrong’ Americans were having babies, was a key theme in anti-abortion agitation. The 1840s and 1850s had seen waves of immigration to the US, and conservatives panicked. As Storer thundered in an 1866 book addressed to women: would the American West ‘be filled by our own children or by those of aliens?’
Lizzie and Frank Ward both came from the kind of families that nativists valued. His ancestors were leaders in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and hers had been American for generations. But, a few years after her abortion, and after their son Roy died before his first birthday in 1866, Lizzie and Frank decided not to have any more children. Frank recorded their relief when an 1868 pregnancy scare proved to be just that – a scare. ‘On Monday, my wife, who had passed her period three entire weeks, so that we managed to give up all hope, finally became sick which turned our solicitude to joy.’ Martha Gee, on the other hand, had six children in close succession while she and her husband Orin scraped out a living in Michigan. By the turn of the century, America’s birth rate was half what it had been in 1800; more families were like the Wards than the Gees. This demographic transition characterised industrialising nations at the time; France and England both went through similar shifts.
Lizzie’s pursuit of learning also troubled traditional values. Frank boasted that her score ‘was better than mine’ on the teachers’ qualifying exam. They spent evenings together reading the Aeneid in Latin and briefly published a newsletter called the Iconoclast. First-wave feminism – women agitating for the vote, leading temperance organisations, giving lectures to other women on female physiology, and even becoming physicians – troubled those who preferred the old ways. In 1867, in a book addressed to ‘every man’, Storer wrote: ‘I am no advocate for unwomanly women; I would not transplant them, from their proper and God-given sphere.’ The Wards were harbingers of the future for American families.
These twin fears, nativism and feminism, changed the reproductive landscape in America. Much as today, abortion was mobilised as a symbol in larger culture wars. For conservatives, abortion was a sign that women were making their own destinies, no longer subservient to patriarchal husbands. Women continued to take abortion pills, but accessing them became more difficult and dangerous. In 1873 social purity advocate Anthony Comstock managed to get a federal law passed that banned the use of the postal system to send contraceptive and abortion-related information and materials. In a country of America’s size, such a ban had immediate effect.
But laws do not change behaviours as neatly as legislators imagine. Historian Leslie Reagan has described many ordinary women’s views on ending a pregnancy as an ‘unarticulated, alternative, popular morality’. Women understood and valued the need to manage fertility, whatever the law might say: ending a pregnancy may be illegal, but women ignored those restrictions, prioritising an individual’s welfare over the letter of the law.
Mary Fissell is J. Mario Molina Professor in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Abortion: A History (Hurst, 2025).
