In the historic courthouse in Wiscasset, Maine, a highly contested trial in late 1836 drew an audience of Lincoln County locals along with legal bigwigs from southern Maine. The state charged Dr. Moses Call of Nobleboro with abortion performed upon Deborah Chapman, age twenty, “a female quick with child.” After a week-long trial the jury found him guilty, with sentencing suspended to allow an appeal.
I recently chanced upon abundant documentation of Call’s case in the Digital Maine Repository of the Maine State Archives. Immediately I recognized how unusual it was. For several years I’ve been hunting up abortion stories carried in U.S. newspapers before 1860, amassing well over 230, the vast majority occurring after 1845. Stories deemed newsworthy typically started with a dead woman and a coroner’s inquest. Surprisingly few progressed to trial and fewer still to conviction. Nonetheless, dramatic accounts entered the news stream, commanding regional and national reprintings.
This Maine case was different: it was conspicuously missing from any and all newspapers, the woman did not die, and no coroner was involved. The convicted doctor appealed the verdict unsuccessfully and then sought pardon from the governor. He submitted dozens of sworn depositions along with petitions signed by over six hundred men and women in Lincoln County, drawing their opinions solely from oral information networks. And the orchestration worked: Dr. Call was pardoned.
This extensive pardon file is rare and revealing. It contains detailed depositions from Deborah and her family. It presents community voices, medical evidence, and commentary from prominent legal spectators. It all happened in a time and place that was teetering between the old common law and Maine’s first statute criminalizing abortion.
That’s what immediately excited me. Dr. Call was charged under Anglo-American common law, which held that only post-quickened abortions were criminal. (Quickening occurs halfway through pregnancy when the mother first feels fetal movement.) Maine passed its first abortion statute in 1840, not long after the pardon of Dr. Call. Could there be a connection?
Before 1840 only three states (New York, Ohio, Missouri) explicitly criminalized abortion in the first half of pregnancy, adopting statutes that retained the common law’s prohibition on post-quickened pregnancy, where a “child” was “destroyed,” and adding a more lightly penalized section covering the procuring of a “miscarriage” on “any pregnant woman.” Nothing in those three states’ newspapers or legislative debates indicates that abortion was a salient public issue, and until now this has seemed to be Maine’s story as well. The new laws emerged during routine legal code revisions, and the dualism of child destroyed/miscarriage procured found in New York in 1828 became a template that other states borrowed. Maine too borrowed this wording, but it broke new ground in completely discarding quickening while introducing a concept labelled “attempted” abortion. My excitement grew when I learned that the judge in Call’s trial, the Hon. Samuel E. Smith, was just ten months later appointed to the small commission charged with statute revision. Bingo: a direct connection between trial and new law.