COMMITTEE ON CHRISTIAN EDUCATION FEATURE

One year after the Dobbs decision [at the time of this author’s writing], the landscape of abortion laws in America looks like a patchwork quilt. Some states are very restrictive, some frightfully permissive—even pushing for abortion, really—with others in between. Leading up to Dobbs and in the year since, much ink has been spilled in court briefs, legislative work, and academic scholarship over the arguments for and against abortion—the why and the why not, the ought and the ought not.

Such “suite-level” scholarship is well complemented by the “street-level” history of abortion in Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas’s The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022 (Crossway, 2023), as Princeton University’s Robert P. George puts it in his foreword. A survey of the history of abortion in America, it is generously interspersed with stories of the figures and characters set in the context of their times.

The abortion stories from early America are the most interesting, if also rarely encountered. The reader travels on the voyage from the Old World to the New with the woman of interest, often of a tragic family background, and sits with her as she falls for a scoundrel who impregnates her. The reader watches with horror as she is given an abortifacient, killing the baby—and often herself.

The pattern repeats itself time and again as colonies settle down, America gains independence, and cities teem with young workers in the rise of industrial urban life. Many of the accounts are grisly, all tragic. Each is reason for us to put on sackcloth and ashes, to weep between the porch and the altar (Joel 2:17).

Notorious abortionists make for a spectacle, and an utterly vile one. Before America met Kermit Gosnell’s jars of severed baby feet in Philadelphia, there was, to pick just one, the infamous Madame Restell in nineteenth-century New York. She grew so fabulously wealthy from plying her abortionist trade that her Fifth Avenue house was replete with a grand hall of marble, three dining rooms with furnishings of gold and bronze, and bedrooms boasting blue brocade satin and bedsteads of gold and ebony. Said a district attorney of her house, “Every brick in that splendid mansion might represent a little skull, and the blood that infamous woman has shed might have served to mix the mortar” (165). The day she was to face trial, she committed suicide at home. Guess what keeps watch over her grave at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery? A monument with a sleeping baby. You can’t make this up.

The size of the book, around five hundred pages, may be a deterrent for those who might otherwise pick it up casually. The authors aid the reader by organizing the book into chronological periods and writing each chapter with a unifying theme, each chapter short and compelling.

The Law of the Land

A few themes of note include the authors’ perceptive sketch of early America’s strong sense of right and wrong expressed through common sense in adjudicating abortion cases, even when there was not much in the common law (and later in statutes) on which to hang their hats. When there have been laws against abortion, poor enforcement, government corruption, and difficulty in obtaining conviction are recurring themes.

Honorable doctors, midwives, ministers, public figures, government agents, and do-gooders earn their place in the book’s hall of fame, if you will—as do their dishonorable counterparts, for shame and for posterity. This reader appreciates the authors’ chronicle of the life-affirming role that the increased visibility of the babe in the womb has played—from sculptures of the developing baby in the 1930s to ultrasound images. The historical link between the rise in contraception and the rise in abortion makes for a sobering read, perhaps especially for Protestants, who have often been quick to dismiss the theological grounding of the case against contraception.

Olasky and Savas are journalists (Olasky served for nearly four decades as editor-in-chief of WORLD), and they write with a journalist’s eye and sensibility. They point out throughout the book how much (or how little!) coverage abortion has garnered in newspapers, major and local, as a function of politics and predilection. They also note how abortion has been covered: sensationally if a beautiful woman was a victim on the table of the abortionist, but nearly always unfairly to babies, who are dismissed and forgotten as victims.

The book leads the reader to the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s, set in context with states’ treatments of abortion at the time. This is of utmost interest in light of the debate of whether the baby in the womb is protected under the Fourteenth Amendment’s original public meaning, to which some answer in the affirmative. Such understanding would make abortion unconstitutional in the land, not up to each state. Such understanding is also what some, this reader included, think is worthy to be the north star in the post-Dobbs fight for life.

Ironically, today’s patchwork landscape of abortion returns the American woman seeking abortion to much the same place two centuries ago: “abortion by ingesting a substance” (375). That is, though red states may ban abortion, people can (and do) get their hands on abortion pills by mail. Chemical abortion pills then make for the new battleground of abortion. In the epilogue, Olasky offers some observations and lessons. The pro-life community would be prudent and enriched to read this book.

The author is associate professor at Trinity Law School.