The Madame Restell Cases

Madame Restell was New York City’s most notorious abortionist and self-made millionaire in the mid-nineteenth century. The Madame Restell Cases portrays five of her patients’ difficult choices when they found themselves pregnant—either unwed or married with too many mouths to feed—and the woman who helped them. This collective biography presents a window into reproductive control in the Victorian era and into the lives of numerous unnamed women who sought to terminate pregnancies because they had no reliable means to prevent them. Madame Restell’s patients’ stories are part of women’s history and the history of abortion in America.