Women might be married and “respectable,” or unmarried and desperate. One 1860 medical paper, written by the physician Edwin Hale, “safely asserted that there is not one married female in ten who has not had an abortion, or at least attempted one.” The doctor further noted that, in his own practice, he had seen women who had given birth to “eight, ten and thirteen children, and [had] at least as many abortions.” Hale was not necessarily horrified by this; he believed that “in no instance should the life, or even the health of the mother be sacrificed to save that of an impregnated ovum before
...more
