From the NY Times:
At first glance, the recent killing of the abortion provider Dr.
George Tiller in Kansas appears to be a modern phenomenon, the heinous
byproduct of the politics of the last several decades. In fact, Dr.
Tiller is just the latest in a line of brave people who have died for
providing abortions. Perhaps the most infamous of these was a midwife
named Ann Lohman, who killed herself in New York in 1878 after decades of harassment.
Lohman, who called herself Madame Restell, was an immigrant from
Gloucestershire, England, who started out selling “female pills” to
“regulate” women. The medicines — mostly herbs, perhaps some opium —
promised relief from an “obstructed womb” and “suppressed”
menstruation. “Not to be used when *******,” declared one of the many
coy ads she placed, “as miscarriage may occur.”
In the event that the pills did not, in fact, induce miscarriage,
Lohman offered a procedure in her offices, charging $20 for poor women,
and as much as $100 for her increasingly wealthy clientele. She also
boarded pregnant ladies, delivered babies, placed infants for adoption
and conducted sex education classes.
In partnership with her husband, Charles Lohman — also known as “Dr.
Mauriceau,” to appeal to the Francophile vanities of the carriage trade
— Madame Restell grew rich from her thriving mail-order business, and
even had agents in Boston, Philadelphia and Providence, R.I. She drove
her fine carriage through Central Park, creating a scandal. The press
delighted in describing her wardrobe, her dresses of silk and velvet,
her hat with its red feather, and her ostentatious five-story house,
with its lush gardens and stables, its tessellated marble entry and
grand fireplaces, which she had built in 1862 on Fifth Avenue and 52nd
Street. The neighbors were said to ridicule her tacky window dressings.
Lohman’s wealth and unrepentant behavior made her a tabloid
favorite. The New York Herald, The National Police Gazette and The
Polyanthos called her a “hag of misery,” “a modern Thug of civilized
society,” and the lady of “the death’s head and the marrow bones.”
Abortion, with its drama of illicit sex and romance gone sour, was, and
remains, a sensation that sells news.
It has also long inspired angry protests. In a riot organized in
1846 by the newspaper publisher George Dixon, a mob surrounded Lohman’s
house and chanted, “Hanging’s too good for her!” and “This house is
built on babies’ skulls.”
Zealous prosecutors pursued Lohman almost from the start, even
though abortion laws were weak and violations difficult to prosecute,
as witnesses were reluctant to come forward and early pregnancy could
not be proved. Even so, from 1839 to 1877, Lohman was arrested at least
five times and jailed for months without bail. She spent countless
hours and dollars defending herself against charges and rumors (that
there was a special sewer built between her house and the Hudson River,
to dispose of corpses; that she was responsible for the unsolved murder
of a cigar girl, a case that Edgar Allan Poe used as the basis for a
story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”).
She was convicted only once, however, and served a year in the
penitentiary on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island on misdemeanor
charges. It was widely believed that she escaped harsher punishment by
threatening to reveal the names of her patients — the mistresses,
daughters and wives of the rich and powerful.
Her published letters suggest that Lohman was passionately
committed to the idea of providing reproductive health care to women.
When the authorities moved to stop the publication of ads for her
services — on the grounds that birth control and abortifacients
corrupted women — Madame Restell wrote to The Herald: “Would your
wives, and your sisters, and your daughters, if once absolved from
fear, all become prostitutes? I cannot conceive how men who are
husbands, brothers or fathers can give utterance to an idea so
intrinsically base and infamous.”
Though abortion by the untrained — then and now — is a dangerous
procedure, no woman was ever proved to have died at Lohman’s hands.
Indeed, testimony in her trials suggested that Madame Restell was a
professional who cared deeply for her patients, staying with them
overnight and nursing them with kind words. One patient testified that
Lohman “told me to take great care, as she should feel anxious until
she saw or heard from me.”
But in the 1870s, Ann Lohman finally met her match in the religious
crusader Anthony Comstock, who persuaded Congress to prohibit the sale
or distribution of materials that could be used for contraception or
abortion, or the sending of such materials by mail. As a special agent
of the United States Post Office, Comstock entrapped Lohman by posing
as a husband seeking abortion services for a lady. When she provided
him with some tablets, he returned and arrested her — accompanied by
two reporters. She faced years in jail.
Despondent, fearing the shame that would come upon her family during
a long trial and convinced that another stint in prison would kill her,
Lohman climbed into her marble bathtub on the April morning her trial
was to start, and slit her own throat. She was 66.
“A bloody ending to a bloody life,” Comstock commented upon hearing
of her death. The newspapers echoed his sentiments. “The end of sin is
death,” wrote The New York Tribune, and The Times editorialized that
Lohman’s death was “a fit ending to an odious career.”
Lohman’s death did not put an end to abortion, nor to the battle
fought over it. The murder of Dr. George Tiller will not accomplish
those ends either.
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