Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist

by Jennifer Wright

1591, Pope Gregory XIV determined that quickening took place around twenty-four weeks.

She informed reporters that “she [had] assisted judges’ daughters, magistrates’ nieces, and jurors’ favorites and friends, and that they dare not ultimately convict her.”

11 As a general rule, women on trial are typically advised to seem mollified and demure and to avoid whispering to reporters, for example, “You think they’re gonna arrest me? You dumb idiot, you utter, unsophisticated rube,” but, as readers well know by now, Madame Restell was far from typical.

You can divine as much from the two portraits in the back of the widely sold transcript of the trial. Maria Bodine, despite being noticeably ill in all the descriptions of her, looks like a fairy-tale princess in her illustrated depiction. She is wearing a white dress, strolling on the hills, overlooking a literal castle. There is also a portrait of Madame Restell, in which Restell is scowling, wearing a shawl made of the wings of a demon, who is greedily devouring a baby. That’s a pretty stark contrast.

To a modern reader who believes in safe, legal abortion, Madame Restell seems to have behaved about as well as one could in these circumstances. She offered her best-informed medical opinion but deferred to her patient’s wishes. She didn’t pressure her out of her choice. She offered a discount despite having to perform a very risky and illegal procedure. She provided constant care after the procedure. She even made sure her patient got home safely at the time when she wanted to leave.

people are cynical about such behavior, that’s understandable. But there are also reasons to believe that Maria was in poor health. She had gone through an extreme medical procedure that she had been advised not to undertake. The operation was performed on a floor. Madame Restell did not so much as wash her hands before plunging them inside a woman to extract and dispose of a six-month-old fetus. An abortion well into the second trimester would be much more arduous for the patient than one performed earlier.

However, Maria’s poor health may also have been owing to the care she received when she returned to Mr. Cook’s home. When she arrived, she told him that she felt poorly. Accordingly, he sent for a doctor, who, according to Maria, “leeched me to my bowels.”21 In addition to that bloodletting, he also cupped her on the back and gave her a powder to ingest that she could not identify.

Admittedly, this is a generalized statement for all the men of the 1840s, but—no one is having sex “every five minutes.” No matter how unchaperoned they are. Even just the concept is exhausting. It is truly fascinating what men during this period

thought could unleash a tidal wave of female lasciviousness—a speculum, a walk with a painter and his girlfriend, any unattended interaction with men. One can only imagine the disappointment of these men to find that women are largely left unattended today, and yet, society has not devolved into an unending orgy, because women still have to buy groceries and go to work and call their moms and generally pursue things that are not ceaseless fornication.

For all the humiliation and hardship Maria faced during the course of this trial, remember that she was not the one who originated the case. Maria had only gone to a physician for her ongoing medical ailments. When she did, the doctor had “told her she had had an abortion produced on her, and must tell him all about it,

In 2014, the New York Times reported on how a pregnant woman in Louisiana went to her doctor for unexplained vaginal bleeding. It was assumed she’d attempted to self-induce an abortion. She was arrested for second-degree

manslaughter and held in jail for a year before it was revealed that she’d suffered a miscarriage.25 In Texas in 2022, a woman was charged with murder for “intentionally and knowingly causing the death of an individual by self-induced abortion” (though the charges were later dropped).26

In Nicaragua, where women and girls can face jail time for abortions, they often seek out “unsafe clandestine abortions,” according to Human Rights Watch in a 2017 report.

Barring extraordinary circumstances like Maria Bodine’s—in which case her warning was more likely to be about the late timing of her abortion than about simply having an abortion—Madame Restell didn’t judge women for needing abortions, or try to talk them out of it. If anything is to be learned from the case of Mary Applegate, it’s that Restell was more likely to judge them if they wanted to keep the baby.

It had not occurred to anyone to declare that Mr. Cook might be at fault here. Indeed, the opposite was true. Madame Restell’s lawyer claimed, “It shall be our effort neither to injure nor to disparage Mr. Cook—his reputation shall not be jeopardized by any insinuation of ours.”29 Of course. Because Maria just impregnated herself.

The implication was that Cook must not have been the father, because he would not have slept with a diseased woman. But this seems unlikely, even if it was true that she had an STD. There’s little evidence to support the notion that men would not sleep with women who had sexually transmitted diseases; if it were true, it would have vastly decreased the number of cases of venereal diseases during the period.

It’s appalling by modern standards that he did not share his suspected diagnosis with his patient, but it would have been less surprising at the time. Doctors sometimes didn’t tell women they had

syphilis, because by doing so they would reveal their husbands’ adultery. They did not want to violate the privacy of their male patients. After all, it was the male patients who paid their fee.

In a country where everyone wants to be rich, many refuse to accept that the rich can be bad. This was not an attitude that would have been wholly unfamiliar in the 1840s to citizens of a city that would, in a matter of decades, become the epicenter of an American “gilded age.”

Saying that someone is

doing something badly, but doing it the way things have always been done, may help explain someone’s behavior, but it does not exonerate the responsible party.

His dismissal was hardly masterminded by a group of shadowy, secretive elites, as the Herald seems to imply. It seems likely that, rather than this being an egregious miscarriage of justice, people thought he should be fired because a malnourished mass of prisoners were constantly escaping while Acker was running back and forth to Madame Restell’s cell and asking if she needed more sugar for her coffee.

The penitentiary finally shut down in 1936 after over a hundred years of much brutality for the poor, and significantly less for the rich. Today, Roosevelt Island is home to apartment buildings and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park.

From July 19–20, 1848, the Women’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. The gathering was organized by a group of women, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, temperance activists, and abolitionists. Stanton later claimed that the convention had launched the “greatest rebellion the world has ever seen.”1

The National Reformer agreed, declaring that the Seneca Falls Convention was “one whose influence shall not cease until woman is guaranteed all the rights now enjoyed by the other half of creation—Social, Civil and Political.”3

Many feminists don’t believe that you can have female liberation without bodily autonomy—at least, insofar as not allowing the government to dictate whether women have to use their bodies to bear a child against their will. However, the suffragettes’ perspective on abortion was more complicated, and would not have been at the forefront of their agenda.

We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed—to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love;… and to have them, if possible, forever erased from our statute-books, deeming them as a shame and a disgrace to a Christian

republic in the nineteenth century.4

“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward women, having in direct of object the establishment of a permanent tyranny over her.”5

1. Women had the right to pursue their own happiness.

2. Laws that prevented women from “such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate,

or which place her in a position inferior to that of man,” were ...

3. Women and men were made equal by God. 4. Women should be enlightened regarding their inferior position and “may no longer publish their degradation by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, nor their ign...

5. If men wanted to claim that women were morally superior, then, logically, women should be speaking and teaching in all religious assemblies.

6. Men and women should be held to the same moral standards by society.

7. “The objection of indelicacy and impropriety, which is so often brought against woman when she addresses a public audience, comes with a very ill-grace from those who encourage, by their attendance, her appearance...

8. Women should have access to a wider sphere of activities than the domestic ones.

9. Women should be allowed to vote.

10. Women and men were equal in the...

11. Women had an obligation to speak in public, write, and teach in order to “promote every righteous cau...

1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. She later helped found the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, which opened a women’s medical college in 1867.

As her biographer Janice P. Nimura noted, it surely frustrated her to open the Directory of the City of New-York for 1852–1853 and see herself listed here as “Elizabeth Blackwell, Physician,” only to turn to the Rs and see Madame Restell listed exactly the same way.19

Madame Restell did not appear to have an interest in women’s causes. She worked with her husband and her brother, or, more accurately, they worked for her. She had likely been trained by a man. She plagiarized the philosophy in her ads from a man. In prison, she chatted amiably with the male keeper of the island, not his wife who was preparing her meals. The people she enlisted for help when she needed bail were often male newspaper editors.

But if there was not a huge overlap between early feminism and abortion rights, men in the medical profession were determined to create one. Within a few decades,

the women who had wanted to work and vote and serve in more powerful positions within the church were cast as baby killers intent on destroying motherhood in America.

Dr. Montrose Pallen, who would argue for criminalizing abortion, had aggressively established the erroneous link between feminism and abortion by 1868, saying, “‘Woman’s rights’ now are understood to be, that she should be a man, and that her physical organism, which is constituted by Nature to bear and rear offspring, should be left in abeyance, and that her ministrations in the fo...

Meanwhile, Dr. H. S. Pomeroy, the author of The Ethics of Marriage, and a fervent antiabortionist, made the same link. He said, “There are advocates of education who seek to deter woman by false pride, from performing the one duty she is perfectly sure of being able to do better than a man! And there are those who teach that their married sisters may save time and vitality for high and noble pursuits by ‘electing’ how few children shall be born to them.”

There were early feminists who felt strongly that women should be able to determine how many children they had. However, in general, what they meant was being able to say no to marriage, or, in cases where women were married, to marital rape (though on that front they’d have to wait some time—America would not have its first law against marital rape until the state of Nebraska made it illegal in 1976).

Elizabeth Cady Stanton agreed that this was a horrible condition. She felt that, due to the laws of marriage, wherein a husband could have sex with his wife whenever he wished, a woman “consents to live in legalized prostitution!—her whole soul revolting at such gross association!—her flesh shivering at the cold contamination of that embrace, held there by no tie but the iron chain of the law.”

Even with these clear statements, it’s not surprising that men quickly tried to establish a link between feminism and abortion. It’s a lot easier to decry feminists by claiming they’re destroying the sacred institution of motherhood and murdering children than to argue that marital rape is good and that women should be trapped as their husbands’ property in loveless marriages.