A 1700s abortion trial in Connecticut

 

A house in Pomfret that could have been like Sarah Grosvenor's who died from an abortion. The story is a chapter from my Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles, which tells of abortion before Roe v. Wade. This is a story of one of the first records of a prosecuted abortion during the mid 1700s in Connecticut.

Pomfret, Connecticut is a post card of a New England town with churches, wooden houses, Robert Frost-type stonewalls and ivy-covered brick buildings. In autumn, leaves turn brilliant reds and golds. The 40+ square miles covered by Pomfret lacks a town center as such. A graveyard, going back centuries, has the thin stone tombstones typical of Puritan times. Some are askew.

The population, for the last date I could locate in 2014, was about 4,100 people. Selectmen, the New England version of an elected town counsel with equal voting rights, govern Pomfret.

Probably most residents today, would not guess that in 1745, 34 years after the village was incorporate and took its name from Lincolnshire, England, was the scene of one of the first reported and prosecuted abortions in the new world. The University of Connecticut has published trial documents, which is why the information exists today. http://history.uconn.edu/taking-the-trade-biographies

Life in the early1700s in the British American colonies for the approximate 300,000 people was difficult. As more people immigrated and the new settlers reproduced, growth was constant.

Settlers found the classes more equal than the societies they had left. However, there were still poor whites, indentured servants or tenant farmers in comparison to those that garnered more prestige such as ministers, doctors, lawyers and landowners of various degrees of wealth.

Those living in New England faced a rugged climate and topography. Religion was strict. There were churches that considered an organ too liberal and dancing dangerous. These limitations seeped into the general population influencing daily life. Celebrations did not include the too-Catholic Christmas.

Farmers represented about 90% of the people living in the colonies, although fishing, trapping, tobacco, blacksmithing, ship building etc. were also practiced trades. In Pomfret, because of its land-bound location and climate, things like commercial fishing, shipbuilding and even tobacco growing were not viable livelihoods. Much farming was subsistence.

Sarah Grosvenor was born and lived all her life in Pomfret. By standards of the time, her family was well off. They owned farmland: her father was one of the first selectmen, an elected village leader, in 1714.

There is no record of how Mary and Leicester Grosevenor felt when their daughter Sarah was born in 1723. They already had one daughter, two-year-old Zerviah. Were the couple disappointed that she wasn’t a boy? I could find no records of other children nor of Mary having miscarriages.

We know little of Sarah’s childhood but at 19 she found herself pregnant by a man eight-years her senior. Were they in love? Did she seduce him? Did he seduce her? Was it mutual desire? Did they make love once or many times? Where did they make love?

One of the frustrations with old records, that the many questions they raise have no answer.

We do know his name was Amasa Sessions and in various documents found later he has been described as “corpulent,” “capable” and “honest.”

In July 1742, sister Zerviah noticed Sarah acted unwell. She suspected that her sister might be pregnant, but when Zerviah asked repeatedly, Sarah denied it.

The girls’ mother, Mary also was so concerned about her daughter that she asked a neighbor, Doctor John Hallowell, to look at her. Dr. Hallowell told the family Sarah was not pregnant.

For reasons that are unclear in existing documentation, Dr. Hallowell took her to another house, where Amasa Sessions visited the girl. When she returned home, she confessed she was, indeed, pregnant.

If Sarah had not been forthcoming with her sister, I am sure she did not rush to tell her parents that they might be grandparents. Although there is no record of any conversations, of her parents’ reactions, I can imagine they were not that different from any parent today. We were told that her mother called Dr. Hallowell in indicates her suspicions.

Zerviah was upset that her sister had not told her before, but Sarah had said she’d been “taking the trade” the popular phrase of the time for using herbs to bring on a woman’s period, a common practice when an unwanted pregnancy was suspected.

Unlike today, there seems be no societal arguments about when life begins. Communications took days, weeks, months by letter and horseback not seconds on the internet.

The mores of the time, considered bringing on a woman’s late period before the baby quickened with different plants, not an abortion.

Marriage would not have been an impossible alternative for Sarah and Amasa: they were of a similar class. Session never denied he was the father. He was reported to have visited Sarah several times during the early part of her pregnancy willingly.

Amasa Sessions was the third son of Joanna and Nathaniel Sessions. The Sessions ran a tavern out of their house and because the father was involved in village politics, the fortunes of the family must have benefited from meetings held there, perhaps the way President Trump’s company benefits from other politicians staying at his Washington, D.C. hotel. That he was not overjoyed at being a father is a guess based on his conversations with John Hallowell.

Amasa expressed he was afraid that his parents would make the young couple’s lives difficult should they marry, but I could find no explanation of why he thought that.

However, with persuasion, Sarah and Amasa decided to marry and stop any attempt to get rid of the baby, something Sarah was said to be ambivalent about. Despite that decision, two weeks passed and no banns were announced. Zerviah saw Amasa giving Sarah more herbs to “finish” what had been started. We don’t have any idea of which herbs they were, but they did not work.

The assumption was abortion was after the baby quickened, when the mother feels the baby moving sometime around the fourth month. Until then the loss of a baby was a miscarriage whether it happened naturally or with help. Missing periods could be corrected by bringing the body back into balance using various herbs. There is the assumption that Sarah was in her fourth month when the baby quickened making the removal of the fetus an abortion not a balancing of her menses. According to her friend Abigail Nightingale’s testimony at a trial three years later, Sarah had told she had felt the baby move for about a fortnight when the abortion attempts were begun.

A number of plants (abortifacient), which were available, were considered effective. Tansy root may or may not have been introduced to the region at the time. Juniper to create savin, pennyroyal and seneca snakeroot were among the popular plants “to restore balance” grew in the region. If a book of abortifacient herbs was available to women in Colonial times, I have not been able to locate it. Much feminine medical care was more general knowledge shared by women.

When the pregnancy continued, Dr. Hallowell surgically removed the fetus, but it took him two attempts over two days. The surgery took place at Sarah’s 30-year-old cousin’s Hannah’s house. Sarah told her friend Abigail that Dr. Hallowell put instruments on the bed and tried to remove the baby.

At one point Sarah fainted. Zerviah brought cold water into the room to revive her.

Amasa hid out at Mr. Waldo’s the local tavern during this period.

Sarah went home that night, but did not miscarry for two days into a chamber pot. The fetus, which appeared damaged, was wrapped in a cloth and buried near the house.

Within ten days, Sarah sickened most likely from dirty instruments. This was before the importance of cleanliness was discovered. Her family called in two other doctors who were unable to save her. She died 14 September 1742 some ten days after the surgery. The court records have testimony that Dr. Hallowell expressed his feelings that he was responsible for her death.

Why there was no official court action for three years is not explained. Not until 1 November 1745, two county magistrates issued calls for Amasa, Hallowell, Hannah and Zerviah. Hallowell’s depositions were delayed. He was in a debtor’s prison in Connecticut.

The Inferiort Court heard deposition, still existent today.

Hallowell was found guilty of murder. Amasa, Hannah and Zerviah were named as accessorites to the crime.

It still wasn’t over.

The Superior Court, in September 1746, indicted Amasa and Hallowell, for destroying Sarah and her unborn child. Although the verdict was issued November 18, a technicality caused the case to be dismissed.

It wasn’t until March 1747 when the king’s attorney tried again. Amasa was released. Hallowell was sentenced to the gallows and lashed on 20 March 1747. He disappeared before either part of the sentence could be carried out.

Amasa married, raised ten children supported by his farm. He seems to have suffered no stigma from his connection with Sarah, served in the militia and died in 1799.

He and Sarah are buried within 25 feet of one another, ironic that they were separated in life. His stone attests to his qualities.

 

The life meant to be lived

Although I was devasted when my ex left me for another woman. She became his second wife. I can only thank them now. My ex lived the life that was good for him. Had I stayed married I probably would still be at 55 Pratt Street, Reading, Massachusetts and lived a life that if not wrong for me, would not have been as satisfying.

Instead, I was able to live the life that was meant for me. 

For many years I lived in Boston, enjoying, the culture, history and atmosphere. With a couple I rennovated a town house and despite the chaos it created, there was much more fun than one would expect stepping over tools, removing paint, tearing down walls, putting down tile, etc.

My daughter was able to get an exceptional education at Boston Latin.

I was able to build a career and although corporate life had downs as well as ups, the challenges were (fill in the blank). It paid the bills and gave me the skills for my next step.

A lifelong dream to live and write in Europe was made possible when I received a job offer in Switzerland -- and it only took mailing more than 800+ CVs (resumes) to France and Germany and one in Switzerland. This led to my becoming a Swiss citizen in 2006.

My first home there was a village in the Jura with 600 residents, 6000 cows, and an old abbey converted to a cave that produced champagne. It can't be called that because of certain laws that only champagne from Champagne, France has the right to use the name.

As for writing--yup that worked too. 

I moved to Geneva, again surrounded by history, the lake, Alps, Jura. Switzerland is a postcard and just stepping out of the house can bring joy to one's eyes.

There I discovered other writers which led to my masters in writing from Glamorgan University in Wales. I had short stories published: one was read on BBC radio. My novel Chickpea Lover, Not a Cookbook, found a publisher after winning a contest for unpublished novels and 40+ rejections. Yes, I am stubborn.

After that I kept publishing books. http://dlnelsonwriter.com . I am awaiting publication for my non-fiction book 300 Unsung Women, biographies of women who have done remarkable things throughout history but never received the credit. I'm awaiting proofs of my anthology The Corporate Virgin. While I'm researching The Bean Pot, a saga based on some family history and the bean pot that was used by my great grandmother, grandmother, and me from the 1890s until today. It will be fictionalized.

After my alleged retirement, I started a financial newsletter and ended up interviewing several world leaders, none of whom will remember me, but doing it amazed me that I could.

At 71 I married my soul mate and we divide our time between Geneva and a French village that would make a great TV serial with all the local characters. We've made friends with expats from England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden. There's nothing like getting bread hot from the oven and picking up local fruits and vegetables from the green grocer. There's the pleasure of sitting in one of the many cafés and chatting with neigbors. Some pass by: some join us. I say I can go out at 8 a.m. to buy fresh bread and not get back until after lunch because of the people I meet.

As for my husband, he has only two faults: he leaves dishes in the sink and over worries. Compared to his many qualities, including putting up with my many quirks, he qualifies for a halo. 

My ex, who recently died, and I were lucky that we didn't live wrong lives with each other.

The knitting needle trick

 

 From my book Coat Hangers and Knitting needles I will print case histories in the next few days.

A Victorian Woman Speaks

My grandmother, Florence Stockbridge Sargent, Dar to everyone who knew her, was the perfect Victorian lady. Even in the early1960s she would never leave the house without her hat, gloves and corset.

I couldn’t imagine her having sex, and that is not a grandchild’s lack of imagination. She bragged that her late husband had never seen her naked, but they must have had sex at least three times because she had three children.

She often repeated the story of helping at the birth of her nephew, Lawrence. Her sister-in-law was in agony.

“You are next Mrs. Sargent,” the doctor was reported to have said.

“Not until I forget tonight,” my grandmother claims to have replied.

She must have forgotten. My Uncle Gordon was born in 1910, his sister Lois in 1915. She died during her first year in my grandmother’s arms, cause unknown, but she had failed to flourish.

My mother was the replacement child born in 1917.

Anxious to preserve my purity, my grandmother cautioned me on keeping the proper distance from a boy on the dance floor. After I had dated my future husband for several months while a sophomore in high school, she asked if he’d ever kissed me. When I nodded, she asked, “On the mouth?”

I did not go into tongues or our petting sessions in his 1950 green Chevrolet.

My imagination was boggled a couple of years later when we were discussing the small number of children her friends had. They were all wives in middle-class Massachusetts and were the essence of the cliché prim and proper. They could star in a period drama of the time.

Trying to think of them having sex lives is hard. Despite my grandmother boasting that her husband never saw her naked, I know how loving they were as a couple. He was an engineer and gruff. He could have taught dogs how to bark at strangers, yet never did a spring go by where he did not pick one endangered species lady slipper from the land behind their house and give it to his wife. His law-abiding ways were put aside to bring her the pleasure of her favorite flower.

Had my grandparents and her friends practiced abstinence?

It was not something I could have ever asked. I didn’t have to. She voluntarily said that the small families were small because women she knew used the “knitting needle” trick.

This was 1965. Griswold v. Connecticut had just been passed so as a married woman (I was 23) I could legally buy birth control for the first time since the Comstock Laws were passed in 1873.

I sat there stunned, not sure that I understood. Once I processed the information, so many thoughts raced through my mind.

If she used the knitting needle method, did she and her friends shove it up their vaginas themselves?

Did a friend help?

Was there a doctor who did it?

I wished I’d asked, but at the time, it seemed so inappropriate, that I could not imagine how I would have gotten the words out my mouth? And as loving as my grandmother was, could I have assaulted her privacy beyond her remark about the “knitting needle” solution?

I believed my grandmother. Her friends had to have some way to control reproduction, because most had two or a maximum of three children. They would cluck at the foreigners and Catholics whom they said, “Bred like bunnies.” I can’t imagine all those stiff Victorian ladies’ husbands going for years without sex. One or two, maybe, but certainly not all.

Thus, when my grandmother referred to the “knitting needle” method of birth control, I was equally shocked in the same way that she would have said, “It’s time for bed,” or “What will we have for dinner tonight?”

Unmarried sex was somehow not all right, but abortion, when necessary, was.

I am now older than my grandmother was when we had the “knitting needle” conversation, and it still shocks me for the casualness of it and the acceptance of something that seems outside the strict spoken moral tone of the time never mind the legal.

The more I researched this book, the more I became aware that although there was so much talk about abortion being totally unacceptable, it was solution for millions of women

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