The Women Who Guarded the Womb
The war against abortion did not begin with the now-overturned 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. From the church’s earliest days, church fathers taught “life for life” restitution for the death of an unborn child (Exodus 21:23–25) and cited David’s praise for God forming “my inward parts . . . in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). Theologian Tertullian described abortion in AD 200 as the surgical extraction of a child from the womb in “violent delivery.” Where ancient society often discarded the life of an unborn child (or abandoned an unwanted newborn), the church cared for orphans and widows.
Even in America, Roe v. Wade did not mark the beginning of the battle against abortion. As I show in The Story of Abortion in America, the growth of urbanization and prostitution led to a huge rise in the number of abortions during the years prior to the Civil War — and a corresponding increase in pro-life activities.
A journalist in 1847 reported a conversation between a doctor and an affluent young woman seeking an abortion to “save herself from disgrace.” Asked how she would choose an abortionist, the young woman picked up a copy of the New York Herald, Manhattan’s most popular newspaper, and pointed to a thinly veiled ad for pills that should not be taken “if pregnant.” That was high society.
On the other end of the social ladder, one public health doctor estimated that sixty thousand prostitutes were in business nationwide — and without effective birth control, many had abortions. Rich or poor, thousands of women killed their children to protect their reputations or income. Others did so in the belief — in those days without photographs or much knowledge of fetal development — that their babies weren’t quite human until “quickening,” when mothers could feel their child moving in the womb.
Pro-life doctors tried to end the perception that early abortion was no big deal. Horatio Storer pushed his colleagues in the young American Medical Association to form a Committee on Criminal Abortion. In 1859, it declared abortion to be “no simple offense against public morality and decency, no mere misdemeanor, no attempt upon the life of the mother, but the wanton and murderous destruction of her child.”
Throughout the next decades, many of the most effective teachers of that truth were women.
Heroines for Life
The woman-to-woman educational effort began in the 1850s with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female to receive a medical degree in the United States. In her book The Laws of Life, she pleaded with women to
look at the first faint gleam of life, the life of the embryo. . . . The cell rapidly enlarges. . . . Each organ is distinctly formed. . . . It would be impious folly to attempt to interfere directly with this act of creation.
Blackwell said female doctors bridged public and private, “occupying positions which men cannot fully occupy, and exercising an influence which men cannot wield at all.”
In the 1860s, Dr. Anna Densmore French gained permission from the New York City Board of Education to use school property to teach schoolteachers about fetal anatomy. Densmore said, “Women would rarely dare to destroy the product of conception if they did not fully believe that the little being was devoid of life during all the earlier period of gestation.” She showed step-by-step that “life processes were going on from the very beginning of embryonic development.”
In the 1870s, Dr. Rachel Gleason directly addressed those who said, “Quickening is not till the four-and-a-half month, and so abortion before that time is no sin.” She responded, in lectures and in Talks to My Patients, “True, that is about the time that the mother becomes conscious of motion, but [the child] lives, moves, and grows just as truly before as after, only the motions are so slight as not to be appreciated.”
In the 1880s, Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham shot down the quickening doctrine in Tokology: A Book for Every Woman. She wrote, “Many women have been taught to think that the child is not viable until after quickening. [But] when the female germ and male sperm united, then is the inception of a new life.” She challenged abortionist logic in frequent lectures:
The life of the babe in her arms is to the mother more precious than all else. . . . By what false reasoning does she convince herself that another life, still more dependent upon her for its existence, with equal rights and possibilities, has no claim upon her for protection?
In the 1890s, Dr. Prudence Saur hit the lecture circuit with her book Maternity: A Book for Every Wife and Mother. Every pregnant woman, Saur said, must remember that
the embryo is alive and hence quick from the moment of conception, [as] modern science has abundantly proven. It follows, then, that this crime is equally great whether committed in the early weeks of pregnancy or at a more advanced period in the life of the fetus.
In the 1900s, Dr. Jennie Oreman spoke of her “firm determination not to tolerate abortion.” She argued for challenging patients and not despairing if they nevertheless had abortions: Doctors could “control a part of the evil, though not by any means banish it. . . . Our duty as physicians is to be strong and firm in our ‘no.’ Practical moral sympathy is what the world needs, and not a flimsy sensual sympathy which is not altruism.”
Mary, Champion of the Unborn
One doctor, Mary Gould Hood, bridged the decades. The daughter of a country pastor, she graduated in 1874 with seventeen others from Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. In Minneapolis, she helped to found the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers. Hood also practiced at the Northwestern Hospital for women and children, which had an all-woman medical staff and an all-woman board of fifty directors.
After moving to Boston, her popular lectures were published as a book, For Girls and the Mothers of Girls: A Book for the Home and the School Concerning the Beginnings of Life (1914). In it she introduced the first moments of fetal anatomy:
The two cells unite, and become one, much as two drops of water, when they come into contact, merge into each other and become one drop. Thus the two cells, which in their origin come from two different beings, unite to form the new cell, which will result in a completely new and different human being. . . . What experience can be more sacred, or more marvelous, than that of the mother who understands that a new human has begun within her?
Hood, like other doctors, pushed back against the notion that life begins at quickening: “This phrase gives undue importance to the first feelings of the mother, for life has been present for eighteen weeks.” Hood also described how children quicken the mother:
Only yesterday there came to me a letter from a young mother who has two babies — one very young, and the other not able to walk. She writes, “There is always something to do for one or the other baby — but I was never so happy in my life.” Motherhood brings with it cares and responsibilities, but it also brings the greatest of earthly joys.
Woman to Woman
Sadly, the influence of pro-life female doctors decreased through much of the twentieth century. In 1890, the United States had fourteen women’s medical colleges, and Boston alone had 210 women doctors (18 percent of all physicians in the city). Many women were such impressive students that some formerly all-male medical schools went coed. For example, by 1893, 19 percent of students at the University of Michigan Medical School were female.
Ironically, the opening of those doors in Michigan and elsewhere contributed to the closing of eleven of the fourteen women’s schools by 1904. Then came the backlash, as medical schools shunted women into nursing, decreasing their influence in the medical world. Only after 1970 did the number of female doctors bounce up once again.
Today, about two of every five actively practicing physicians in the US are female. Many women are members of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Women lead thousands of pregnancy resource centers, post-abortion counseling groups, and many other activities that their pro-life predecessors would esteem.
These women each practiced medicine and truth-telling, providing care for mothers and sharing their wonder in God’s work at conception. Before the sonogram or ultrasound, they believed God watched each embryo while he formed him or her in secret (Psalm 139:13). Like the Egyptian midwives, their fear of God over public pressure saved lives (Exodus 1:17). And today, we desperately need more women to speak to women.
If God has given you children, join Mary Hood and thank him for the great earthly joy of motherhood. Also look for opportunities in your church or local community to serve mothers in crisis, such as by offering transportation or childcare for ultrasounds and prenatal appointments. Abortions by pill continue to increase, leaving many women isolated during and after their choice. Women in your mom’s group or Bible study may carry deep guilt from an abortion. Perhaps a woman like you could grieve with them and offer to walk through counseling.
And above all, please pray along with me that God will raise up even more Elizabeth Blackwells and Mary Hoods.
