In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion is once again a crime in large swaths of the United States. Abortion opponents have taken a particularly keen interest in criminally punishing physicians and other abortion providers. Nicholas Syrett’s masterful study of the nation’s most famous “abortionist,” Madame Restell, is at once the story of a significant and poorly understood woman and an illuminating origin story of criminal abortion laws. Restell, née Anna Lohman, was born in England in 1812 immigrated to the United States, and became a single mother before at some point gaining medical training and reemerging as Madame Restell, an unapologetic and famous “female physician.”
Syrett offers a compelling portrait of Restell and the wide range of patients she served. The Trials of Madame Restell also tells the story of the reporters, anti-vice activists, and prosecutors who invented “Restell,” the abortionist who embodied a form of moral decay that her critics called “Restellism.” (P. 2, 58.) Syrett’s book brings to life the world of nineteenth-century New York. Yet despite—or perhaps because—Syrett’s story is deeply rooted within a particular time and place, The Trials of Madame Restell feels all too relevant to post-Dobbs America. Syrett captures the complexity of both pregnancy and its medical treatment, as well as the way that politicians, social movements, and prosecutors deliberately blind themselves to this nuance.
Madame Restell has inspired a number of impressive studies, including Jennifer Wright’s Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Famous, and Fearless Abortionist, which appeared the same year as The Trials of Madame Restell. While Lohman, like many of her contemporaries, had no medical license or obvious formal training, Syrett makes the revealing choice to refer to Restell as she saw herself: as a female physician, “a female practitioner who saw women patients, like midwives had been doing for centuries.”(P. 6.) He draws upon meticulous spadework to tell the story of Anna Lohman, mining sparse records to paint a complex portrait. Syrett’s Restell is one of a kind, a compassionate provider and ambitious businesswoman, but she is also something entirely ordinary, a midwife, who assisted with contraception and childbirth as much as abortion. Syrett acknowledges mysteries surrounding Restell that historians have not yet conclusively resolved—where Restell learned her trade, for example, or what she thought in private moments.
But The Trials of Madame Restell is at much a story of Madame Restell’s era as it is a biography of a single figure. Anna Lohman could become a figure of nationwide notoriety, Syrett writes, because her career coincided with a moment when changes to Americans’ reproductive lives, together with challenges to gender roles and growing urbanization and immigration, inspired a backlash, and ultimately a campaign to criminalize abortion. Restell became the living symbol of “abortionists,” Syrett shows, not only because of her extraordinary success—she had a lavish mansion on Fifth Avenue and did nothing to hide her wealth (P. 223)—but because she defended herself, and at least by implication, the women who sought to manage their fertility. Restell’s advertisements appealed to married women whose health was threatened by pregnancy. Faced with prosecution, she wrote letters to the public defending herself. She thus made herself a target, Syrett convincingly argues, by openly justifying changes to gender roles and reproduction that many preferred be left unspoken.
The Trials of Madame Restell also offers rich portrayals of Restell’s business rivals and patients, many of whom she charged on a sliding scale. (P.56.) Tellingly, Restell and her clients saw her services—abortion, contraception, childbirth, and brokering adoptions—as interrelated, the natural jobs of a “female physician.” Syrett contrasts this understanding with the one developed by Restell’s chief antagonist, Anthony Comstock, the most visible leader of the then-burgeoning anti-vice movement. Comstock helped draft the eponymous 1873 Comstock Act, a federal statute criminalizing the mailing of a vague category of obscene materials, including contraceptive and abortion-related items.
In some ways, Comstock and Restell were cut from the same cloth: both were self-made celebrities and unapologetic about their views. It was for this reason, Syrett suggests, that Restell so infuriated Comstock: she unashamedly embodied the ongoing changes in women’s lives that he railed against. Comstock secured a serious conviction against Restell by changing New York obscenity law—lobbying alongside the New York Young Men’s Christian Association—and, more generally, by changing how men in New York understood her work. Abortion and contraception, Comstock urged, were not part of the standard repertoire of a female physician but antithetical to women’s sexual purity and family obligations. Converting Restell from a female physician into an abortionist was a necessary step for those seeking to convict her.
Restell’s suicide brought a tragic end to a complex and consequential life. Comstock, Syrett reminds us, would brag not only about bringing down Restell but also about encouraging her to take her own life. But The Trials of Madame Restell shows that her legacy lives on. For activists like Comstock, Restell was a convenient symbol of what they called the abortionist: someone who helped women escape the consequences of nonprocreative sex and made a handsome profit in doing so. For patients of her generation, Restell symbolized the opportunity to shape a different life through managing reproduction. And in the years beyond, Restell’s words lived on. As one of the rare nineteenth-century voices questioning the wisdom of criminalizing abortion or contraception, she remained an example to later mobilizations.
Syrett’s Restell emerges as both a singular figure and the product of the period in which she lived, and yet her story has all too many parallels to today. Contemporary anti-abortion groups seek to revive the Comstock Act as a de facto ban on all abortions, while conservative politicians seek to replicate Comstock’s feat of stigmatizing abortion providers as aberrational rather than regular physicians. Supporters of abortion rights have sought, like Restell, to normalize abortion as a medical service and to position it as a part of a broader agenda for reproductive autonomy rather than a stand-alone issue. As Syrett reminds us, we may still be living in Madame Restell’s America more than we would care to admit.
