Why Not? Memory and Counter-Memory in 19th-Century Abortion Rhetoric

In 1867, an anonymous woman published a letter in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (later to become the New England Journal of Medicine) that refuted Horatio Storer, leader of the anti-abortion movement. In this essay I argue that this letter highlights issues of memory within abortion rhetoric. Storer advocated white racial regeneration through criminalized abortion. He called aborting women ignorant and exhorted them to remember their reproductive duty or they would threaten future generations. His anonymous critic produced a counter-memory of abortion practice based in women's experience, a perspective from which she attacked marriage as licensed sexual abuse. I conclude with a discussion of the importance of attending to issues raised by the formation of memory in rhetoric about abortion. In 1867 in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, which later became the New England Journal of Medicine, an anonymous author known only as the "wife of a Christian physician" called abortion an act of rebellion and named marital abuse and neglect as the primary cause.(1) She did this to refute the characterization that women who aborted were ignorant and unmindful of their maternal duty, an argument that had been put forward by H. R. Storer, the nation's leading anti-abortionist, in his highly publicized tract, Why Not? A Book for Every Woman (1866b). Storer employed a rhetoric of racial regeneration, advocating the criminalization of abortion in order to revitalize the white lace. The crux of his indictment of abortion practices was a claim of recollecting the forgotten: women were ignorant of the maternal imperative, which was always remembered by their bodies, if not their minds. In contrast, the anonymous letter writer directly challenged the issue of remembrance of duty. She mirrored Storer's indictment, adopting similar ideological commitments to marriage and child-beating, but she materialized a different collective memory of reproduction that reversed Storer's claim of ignorance and attacked marriage as imprisonment. Notwithstanding the unusual appearance of an article by a woman in a journal known for its opposition to women's education, especially in medicine, this essay is one of the few open discussions of abortion in the nineteenth-century that attempted to discern motive and causation from a perspective other than that of the American Medical Association's official anti-abortion position. Moreover, it is the only one I have found that explicitly placed abortion in the category of resistance to male dominance. Even theses about abortion written by female physicians at the Female Medical College in Philadelphia (one of the first and most influential women's medical schools of the century), and works by voluntary motherhood advocates such as Harriet Stanton Blatch (1891) did not constitute abortion as resistance.(2) The letter is also unique in that it elicited a response from Storer, Is It I? A Book for Every Man (1868b), that attempted to accommodate his critic's attacks.(3) There are many facets of the rhetoric of Storer's book and the short, anonymous rebuttal that merit remark, such as the pathos of tragedy or the rhetoric of gendered guilt and purification. However, I will confine my commentary to the formation of memory in the service of reproductive normalcy. Mnemonic methods are always potentially relevant to a critic of rhetoric, given that, to demonstrate knowledge of anything, recollection of that knowledge must be practiced. In some way, the knowledge that grounds one's discourse must be made present. In rhetoric about abortion, memory formation is especially significant because memory is intimately tied to knowledge of life and death, being and absence. Accounting for memory formation in abortion rhetoric offers an alternate, important perspective on the political stakes of the controversy. Memory regenerates the past in the present as does reproduction. In a way, the knowledge born by every cultural and biological re-creation is the substance of memory. …