beyond a verdict of "not proven" on Right-to-Life claims to argue that the early feminists' insights about the law have lasting power.
The CrusadeNineteenth-century women's rights activists encountered abortion as a public issue in the form of a well-organized movement to criminalize it, a "crusade" against abortion that arose among credentialed medical doctors. As the historian James Mohr has shown, most forms of abortion were not illegal in the early republic, and the crusaders, who organized in the 1850s under the leadership of Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer, vowed to change that. Charging that abortion had become "fearfully prevalent," the crusaders condemned the selfishness of women who wished to limit the size of their families, and some also blamed abortion on "strong-minded women." The doctors challenged the traditional view that human life began at "quickening," when the woman could feel movement. They held that quickening was insignificant and that the beginning of fetal life must be backdated to the moment of conception, which meant changing the common understanding of what constituted an abortion. 3 According to the traditional view, when a woman stopped menstruating, she might be pregnant, but she might also be ill, and because regular menstruation was thought to be crucial to good health, women could turn to an array of medications known as "emmenagogues" or other interventions to cure amenorrhea. During this period of uncertainty, women could make decisions about whether or not to proceed with possible pregnancies, and the law ignored those early, private decisions. To the extent that early nineteenth-century law had noticed abortion at all, it referred only to a "quick child"; such laws as did exist were directed toward the abortionist, often seemed designed to protect the woman, and were seldom enforced except in cases where the woman died. 4 The crusading doctors insisted that any interference with possible pregnancy, including measures taken to "restore regularity" before a woman could even be sure she was pregnant, must be recategorized as abortion-and forbidden by strong new laws.The doctors were reacting to real changes in fertility control and in medicine. Nineteenth-century America was in the midst of a rapid demographic transition that saw the average marital fertility rate drop precipitously, and couples evidently resorted to abortion as one means to limit family size. Abortion also became more visible as commercial providers of abortifacients and abortion services ran ads in the newspapers, and "Madame Restell," New York City's most prominent abortionist, flaunted her wealth with a mansion on Fifth Avenue. Doctors were also advancing their Journal of Women's History 104 Fall professional interests, as they sought control of a wide-open, unlicensed medical profession in which "regular" physicians had to contend with "irregular" competitors, including homeopaths, health reformers, midwives, and water-cure practitioners. Crusading against abortion allowed regulars to lay claim to obstetrics, ...
