This is a companion piece to Julia Porter Burke’s article Irregularities of the System: the Crime of Abortion in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales recently published Open Access in History Workshop Journal 101.
In its 2022 ‘Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization‘ decision, the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion in the United States, and held that access to abortion should be determined by state law. In turn, in 2023, the Food and Drug Administration formally adopted Covid-era rule changes that did away with the requirement that mifepristone and misoprostol, which together comprise the most common medication abortion regime, be administered in person. The effect was to expand access to abortion by allowing these drugs to be prescribed remotely and delivered by mail – much to the chagrin of the state of Louisiana, which, in 2025, asked for a stay of those access-expanding dispensing rules. When the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted that stay, the nationwide in-person dispensing requirement was reinstated – that is, until two months ago. In mid-May of this year, the Supreme Court stayed the stay, halting the reinstatement until Louisiana’s case makes its way through lower courts, whatever the decision might be.
Those fighting the fight against anti-abortion extremists in the States have pointed out the lunacy behind this dizzying volley of re-reinstatements and stayed stays. Mifepristone, the drug currently under fire, for instance, has been found to be four times safer than Penicillin and ten times safer than Viagra.
Largely taken for granted by all parties, though, is the ‘telehealth’ of it all: a subtle but persistent tendency to treat the at-home abortion like a convenience of scientific advancement and late-stage capitalism. It’s as if people haven’t been having abortions at home for as long as people have been having abortions. Even the mail-order abortion pill is an older phenomenon than it might first appear, long pre-dating today’s ecommerce and global delivery networks that pluck products from the virtual ether and deposit them on doorsteps.
If you were a Londoner, for example, in, say, 1898, newspapers would have marketed to you a variety of at-home solutions for ‘female irregularities’. Unless couched in sufficiently vague language, advertisements for abortifacients (or, any abortion-inducing substance – in this case pills) were incitements to crime. Luckily for advertisers, there was something enchanting about that euphemistic verbiage. The ‘speedy remedies’ and the ‘complete relief’ flooding the ad pages of British newspapers promised customers the ‘removal of even the most obstinate’ – if unspecified – ‘obstructions’. Some of those ‘remedies’ were better than others, and some – like ‘Lady Montrose’s Medicine Tabules for Female Ailments’ – were outright villainy. Not only was ‘Lady Montrose’, in fact, the aptly surnamed Chrimes brothers (yes, Richard, Edward, and Leonard Chrimes), but those brothers were, in 1898, hatching one of the most enterprising and scandalous blackmail operations London had ever seen.
‘Lady Montrose’ hadn’t been in business very long, but business was good. In the two-and-a-half years since 1896, when the brothers first rented the Ludgate Circus office to receive Montrose orders, they had amassed 12,000 customers. In October of 1898, 8,000 of those customers received an identical letter from a ‘Charles J. Mitchell’ (also the Chrimes brothers). In the letter, ‘Mitchell’ gallantly offered to drop the charges already underway against each recipient for her past purchase of those abortifacient pills – for the price of two guineas, or forty-two shillings. (To put this in perspective, Charles Booth’s 1889 poverty study of London found that over one-third of Londoners subsisted on 21 shillings per week or less). The Chrimes brothers were demanding weeks of wages from their customers for buying what they themselves advertised extravagantly and sold indiscriminately. Thousands of women, who, if convicted, faced a lifetime of penal servitude under the 58th Section of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, took ‘Mitchell’ up on his offer.
The intricacies of this blackmail scheme – so loathsome and audacious as to border on impressive – are detailed in this recent History Workshop Journal article. The scam’s logistics speak to how urbanisation and industrial capitalism had changed both the practice and the crime of abortion by the end of the nineteenth century. Among the most consequential of those changes was the de-legitimisation of what historian Angus McLaren called ‘semiprofessional medical personnel’ by ‘professional’ doctors, comparatively new arrivals, looking to edge out competitors. Doctors, McLaren argued, ‘had always been suspicious of midwives’. But increased coverage in newspapers and medical journals of botched abortions at the hands of ‘non-professionals’ offered doctors new opportunities to turn (very meagre) ‘public concern over abortion to their own purposes’. Midwives, herbalists, abortionists and chemists faced increased scrutiny from both the (male-dominated) medical establishment and (male-dominated) criminal justice system. And the ‘authorised’ abortion was removed from the familiar spaces of everyday life and sequestered in doctors’ offices and hospitals.
This is not to say that abortions themselves were sequestered there: abortions happened, and continue to happen, all over the place, in all sorts of ways, for innumerable reasons. Your nineteenth-century physician would have had no way of knowing about that monthly scalding bath and large glass of gin that fended off any unwanted ‘obstructions’. Instruments used to induce miscarriage would have looked an awful lot like knitting needles to your local Victorian constable. The undetected and undetectable successful abortions that took place where abortions had always taken place – at home – were not crimes. They were, rather, instantiations of a long-established and expansive tradition of household medicine (as Holly Fletcher and Sasha Handley’s recent HWJ article illustrates). The ‘non-professionals’ active in these domestic spaces were empowered – by necessity or by inclination – to experiment, to share, to take matters into their own hands.
Such matters had to go seriously awry to come to the community’s, let alone the state’s, attention, but they sometimes did. Crucially, the rare prosecutions of abortion in the first half of the nineteenth century were concerned with what today we might call intimate partner violence. They were focused primarily on coercion, assault, and extramarital paternity, and were brought overwhelmingly against the man responsible for the pregnancy. By the end of the century, abortion trials looked very different. In only a few decades, the figure of the ‘criminal abortionist’ had undergone a drastic transformation: from an abusive man to an under-licensed woman. Accompanying that transformation was the efficient, ruthless wresting of jurisdiction over abortion away from the diverse professions and places and people whose authority had rarely before been contested. It is, of course, debatable whether the medical establishment’s jurisdictional creep was spurred by professional self-interest or genuine concern for public health. Given the Chrimes brothers of the world, some concern was warranted. Less debatable, though, is the real interloper in the history of abortion: professionalised medicine (to say nothing of its modern corporate insurance overlords).
It is worth keeping these histories in mind, as the American judiciary works itself into costly hysterics over whether people should be allowed to administer to themselves a low-risk medication with a four-decade track record of safety. Mifepristone is, by every measure, no Montrose ‘remedy’. The ‘at-home’ abortion is not new: it is the overwhelming historical norm, thousands and thousands of years older than the medical and legal institutions looking to regulate and to police it today.