In the late spring of 1839 in New York City, a nineteen-year-old, white working-class woman named Ann Maria Purdy confided an intimate secret to Rebecca Cromer, her Black laundress: she was pregnant, and worried that her state would prevent her from nursing her ten-month-old son. The washerwoman was sympathetic, and gestured toward a newspaper where a woman named Mrs. Restell published advertisements for “remedies” that could prevent pregnancy. Cromer knew women who had consulted Restell to terminate their pregnancies, too. Purdy would go on to pay Restell for an abortion, and her case would result in the first great abortion trial in New York City in 1841. Purdy was, however, far from exceptional as a client. Lucinda Van Buskirk, a friend whom Purdy brought with her to Restell’s office, testified that she saw three women and two men in Restell’s office. In the same year, another woman named Hester Wells accompanied a friend seeking an abortion to Restell’s, and later reported that she saw multiple women in the waiting room. The women’s testimonies implied that Restell operated a lucrative business, suggesting that abortion was common among women in early nineteenth-century New York City.
These examples show how abortion is a deeply embedded part of United States history, so long as you consider women to be part of the nation. As a historian interested in the narratives of women like those mentioned above, I paused when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito argued in his decision for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that a right to abortion is not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Alito recounted that abortion “had long been a crime in every single State” until Roe because “a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions.” While an enshrined right to abortion may have been contested in American legal history (the nineteenth-century restrictions to which Alito referred were, in fact, legal innovations at the time they were passed), an unyielding tradition of abortion becomes clear when one looks at the women who comprise “the nation.” Alito’s insistence on the right to abortion looks only at legal precedents established by white men in power, not the experiences of women. Centering women’s lived experiences challenges Alito’s definitions of history, tradition, and the “nation,” revealing an America in which the practice of abortion is not only deeply rooted, but often beneficial.