‘The helpless French girl’: Seduction narratives in a nineteenth-century abortion trial

Abstract

In the 1840s, newspaper reporters and prosecutors in New York City began to use literary tropes about seduction to characterise unmarried women who had abortions. This article uses an 1844 trial over an abortion performed on a young French immigrant woman to demonstrate how the uptake of such tropes obscured women's own perspectives about sexual relations and vilified abortion providers. This process ultimately fostered growing anti-abortion attitudes in the decade before the American Medical Association's campaign to criminalise abortion, revealing the cultural, not just medical, roots of anti-abortion activism in the USA.