Lizzie and Frank Ward began seeing one another in early 1860. They went for walks within the northern Pennsylvania woods, attended church socials, and kissed. As Frank joyfully famous in his diary in March 1860: ‘Carefully held in loving arms we lay, embraced, and kissed all evening.’ When Frank enlisted within the Union military two years later, they shortly married and he went off to the entrance. Remarkably, Frank additionally recorded that Lizzie ended a being pregnant early of their married life, noting ‘she was going to have a toddler, however she took an efficient treatment’. This and different entries in his youthful journal had been revealed a long time later, after his loss of life. Within the late Nineteenth century he had turn into properly referred to as a founding father of the brand new self-discipline of sociology.
Frank was wounded within the Battle of Chancellorsville in Could 1863 and returned to the small city of Towanda to convalesce. After a couple of months, he resumed navy service as a part of the so-called Invalid Corps, turning into a clerk in a military hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, the place he was quickly capable of organize a place for Lizzie as properly, supervising the laundresses.
The couple’s married life actually started whereas they had been residing within the hospital. Per week after she arrived, they performed checkers within the night and ‘she defeated me each time’. On different evenings Lizzie labored on her French and Frank his Greek. Low wages and wartime inflation made life troublesome. Frank purchased a frying pan for $10 (nearly £200 in right now’s worth) and rented it out to different households for 15 cents every week. He boasted in his journal that he had already recouped seven {dollars} of the acquisition value. They bought a few of their rations – a ten-day provide included ‘espresso, sugar, salt, pepper, ham, salt pork, and 4 loaves of bread’ – and Lizzie took in washing.
Lizzie grew to become pregnant early in 1864, however their hand-to-mouth existence within the hospital was no place to rear an toddler. With out telling her husband, she acquired some drugs from Martha Gee, the spouse of one other Invalid Corps soldier on the hospital, and terminated the being pregnant. Frank solely discovered in regards to the abortion when Lizzie contracted a sore throat a couple of days later, and he or she informed the physician about it. All three had been extra frightened in regards to the sore throat. If Frank was troubled by Lizzie’s determination, and by the actual fact he had not been consulted, he didn’t point out it in his diary. Nor was the doctor bothered; his consideration was targeted on her throat, lancing a swelling to launch pus. Such lack of concern, even in states similar to Virginia the place abortion was unlawful, was typical of the way in which most Individuals – medical doctors and their sufferers – considered abortion on the time.
Within the mid-Nineteenth century, American medical doctors struggled in an unregulated market. Medical coaching may imply something from three months in a storefront medical faculty to years at college. Graduates competed with water-cure, homeopathy, and natural drugs practitioners. In 1859 a handful of the graduates of elite medical colleges, spearheaded by Harvard-trained Horatio Robinson Storer, began an anti-abortion marketing campaign, searching for a excessive ethical floor with which to tell apart themselves from the competitors. It isn’t clear why Storer selected this problem, though developments in embryology had begun to problematise the longstanding distinction between abortion earlier than quickening (when a pregnant girl first felt a foetus transfer) and after. In these few states the place abortion was unlawful, similar to Virginia, abortion earlier than quickening was often solely a misdemeanour and barely prosecuted. Storer started a letter-writing marketing campaign to state legislatures, and by 1880 all states and territories had criminalised abortion.
State legislators had been most likely extra persuaded by social than medical arguments. Nativism, the idea that the ‘improper’ Individuals had been having infants, 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 guide addressed to girls: would the American West ‘be crammed by our personal youngsters or by these of aliens?’
Lizzie and Frank Ward each got here from the type of households that nativists valued. His ancestors had been leaders within the Massachusetts Bay Colony and hers had been American for generations. However, a couple of years after her abortion, and after their son Roy died earlier than his first birthday in 1866, Lizzie and Frank determined to not have any extra youngsters. Frank recorded their reduction when an 1868 being pregnant scare proved to be simply that – a scare. ‘On Monday, my spouse, who had handed her interval three total weeks, in order that we managed to surrender all hope, lastly grew to become sick which turned our solicitude to pleasure.’ Martha Gee, then again, had six youngsters in shut succession whereas she and her husband Orin scraped out a residing in Michigan. By the flip of the century, America’s beginning charge was half what it had been in 1800; extra households had been just like the Wards than the Gees. This demographic transition characterised industrialising nations on the time; France and England each went by way of comparable shifts.
Lizzie’s pursuit of studying additionally troubled conventional values. Frank boasted that her rating ‘was higher than mine’ on the lecturers’ qualifying examination. They spent evenings collectively studying the Aeneid in Latin and briefly revealed a e-newsletter known as the Iconoclast. First-wave feminism – girls agitating for the vote, main temperance organisations, giving lectures to different girls on feminine physiology, and even turning into physicians – troubled those that most well-liked the previous methods. In 1867, in a guide addressed to ‘each man’, Storer wrote: ‘I’m no advocate for unwomanly girls; I’d not transplant them, from their correct and God-given sphere.’ The Wards had been harbingers of the long run for American households.
These twin fears, nativism and feminism, modified the reproductive panorama in America. A lot as right now, abortion was mobilised as a logo in bigger tradition wars. For conservatives, abortion was an indication that ladies had been making their very own destinies, now not subservient to patriarchal husbands. Ladies continued to take abortion drugs, however accessing them grew to become harder and harmful. In 1873 social purity advocate Anthony Comstock managed to get a federal legislation handed that banned using the postal system to ship contraceptive and abortion-related data and supplies. In a rustic of America’s measurement, such a ban had rapid impact.
However legal guidelines don’t change behaviours as neatly as legislators think about. Historian Leslie Reagan has described many abnormal girls’s views on ending a being pregnant as an ‘unarticulated, different, fashionable morality’. Ladies understood and valued the necessity to handle fertility, regardless of the legislation may say: ending a being pregnant could also be unlawful, however girls ignored these restrictions, prioritising a person’s welfare over the letter of the legislation.
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Mary Fissell is J. Mario Molina Professor within the Historical past of Medication at Johns Hopkins College and the writer of Abortion: A Historical past (Hurst, 2025).
