by Jennifer Wright
(Hachette books, New York, 2023, 334 pp.)

Reviewed by Maria McFadden Maffucci

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Crawling through this “pop history” book on Madame Restell brought to mind “The Piranha Brothers,” a memorable skit from the absurdly hilarious Monty Python’s Flying Circus program.
The fictional Doug and Dinsdale Piranha in the Monty Python skit are violent criminals who terrorize their victims, as this “interview” of one of Dinsdale’s victims reveals:

Interviewer: I’ve been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor.

Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.

Interviewer: But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor.

Stig: [pause] Oh yeah, he did that.

Interviewer: Why?

Stig: Well he had to, didn’t he? I mean there was nothing else he could do, be fair. I had transgressed the unwritten law.

Interviewer: What had you done?

Stig: Er . . . well he didn’t tell me that, but he gave me his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough for me with old Dinsy. I mean, he didn’t want to nail my head to the floor. I had to insist. He wanted to let me off. . . . He was a hard man. Vicious but fair.

By all historical accounts, including this one, Madame Restell was a hard, often vicious woman who lied, cheated, sold sketchy birth control potions, and performed surgical abortions without any medical training, all so she could amass great wealth. She killed hundreds—thousands?—of babies, and along the way gravely injured—probably killed—several women as well. Yet author Jennifer Wright conjures up a feminist hero, as do the gushing endorsements on the book cover, including this one from “award-winning journalist” Katie Couric:

If she were alive today, Madame Restell might be described as a “badass’”—someone who protected women’s reproductive rights decades before they could even vote. [sic]

So how does Wright create a “shero” out of the true accounts of this notorious abortionist? Partly through Monty Python-esque rationalizations—too frequent to list, but I will share a few.
“Madame” (her real name was Ann Trow) was born into poverty in England in 1812. Sent into domestic service early, she married at 16 and had a daughter. Soon, realizing her new husband was a weak alcoholic and not her ticket to better things, she became a seamstress and set off with her family to find fortune in New York City.

They landed in lower Manhattan, near the crime- and disease-ridden Five Points neighborhood, which gives Wright the opening for this bizarre comment:

It follows then that Ann, a young mother who probably walked through that neighborhood every day, must have been a good deal braver than American folk hero Davy Crockett. (12)
What? Is this supposed to be the “pop” in “pop” history? But Wright’s book is peppered with weird observations like this, as well as odd sentences seemingly presented without irony, like “Incest happened in 1846, too” (88) and “… anyone who has given birth can tell you it takes a toll physically” (31).

But back to Ann. Three years after her first husband died, she married Charles Lohman, a printer for the New York Herald, who was part of a radical group espousing population control. Ann apprenticed with a “pill compounder” in her neighborhood, and, realizing there was much money to be made from providing women with “preventative potions,” she and her husband “dreamed up” an alias to give consumers confidence: a Frenchwoman, a “female physician who had worked at hospitals in Paris and Vienna” (28).

The newlyweds actively advertised Madame’s services in the newspapers, but they faced competitors, whom Restell ruthlessly attacked as con artists. This was, Wright remarks, “short-sighted” (a term she uses frequently in the book, along with “shortcut”): “It seems wildly shortsighted of her” not to have seen that she could have banded together with her competitors to “become a collective of like-minded professionals. . . . But how could Madame Restell have focused on such ideas when she was still just trying to climb her way out of poverty?” (34).

Restell plagiarized texts for her “medical” ads from Robert Dale Owen, a well-known writer who preached the benefits of contraception. “While this is obviously a frustrating shortcut for Madame’s fans today,” admits Wright, “Owen was at least an excellent choice from whom to plagiarize . . .” (104). Brava, Ann!

By age 29, Restell “was well on her way to creating an empire” (36): In fact, “Throwing herself into single minded empire building may be the most quintessentially American thing Madame Restell ever did!” (173).

Still . . . how to grow that empire further? By performing abortions, of course! Using a whale bone! Although Wright calls the whale bone “eerily reminiscent” of coat hangers, Restell was apparently skilled, and “there is little evidence” that she lost patients (37). Wright spends several paragraphs ruminating about where our entrepreneur got her training, noting (I kid you not) that as a domestic servant in England she had worked for a butcher: “This background would have stood her in good stead” (39). Let that sink in.

Now in the Land of Opportunity, Madame Restell knew she had just what it takes to succeed:

Madame Restell believed she was smarter than most of the people around her. Although some who fancy themselves to be intellectually superior are narcissistic, that’s not true of everyone. A person might simply be acknowledging reality—and in the case of Restell, a woman who ran an underground birth control empire and performed successful operations time after time without any formal medical schooling, it could very well have been true. (85)

And yet, thinking she knew best led to “shortcomings . . . never clearer than when she stole Mary Applegate’s baby” (85). Yes, she stole and sold, or got rid of, a servant woman’s wanted baby, at the request of the woman’s wealthy employer, the father. What a brave move against the patriarchy!

And despite her surgical skills, not all women came through unscathed from her abortions. She was arrested for the deaths or illnesses of several women. Yet she had been like a mother to them! Wright emotes: “. . . her treatment of Maria Bodine, which came into public view in 1857 [when she was arrested for performing a late-term abortion], showed off her best qualities” (113). Bodine wanted an abortion but was 24 weeks pregnant. Restell at first said no, but finally agreed, lowering her price to accommodate her patient. “Overall, Maria’s experience with the abortionist seems to have been rather nurturing and empathetic. She would provide the care and compassion that a mother did during this trying time” (121). But “The operation was performed on a floor. Madame Restell did not so much as wash her hands before plunging them inside a woman to extract and dispose of a six month fetus” (122). Maria started bleeding two days later and became intractably, gravely ill. But was that really Restell’s fault?

Wright spends pages surmising that Maria’s illness may have resulted from the faulty care she received after the abortion, or perhaps she had already been suffering from syphilis. To be fair: Even real doctors did not wash their hands in those days—which Wright admits caused all sorts of infections. But is this not a possible explanation for Maria’s condition?

Restell was convicted and imprisoned several times for her illegal activities, but because of her corrupt friends, she lived in luxury even when she was on the “inside.” In the end, however, finally facing serious prison time, she slit her own throat in her bathtub. Yet Wright proposes an alternate “resurrection” theory: Restell may have faked her own death, switched another woman’s body for hers in the morgue, and fled to Paris to live out her life in blissful luxury! Why not? How could our great lady die in despair?

Needless to say, Wright wastes no space wondering whether pre-born children have any rights at all. She reflexively condemns anti-abortionists then and now as misogynist sexual puritans or white supremacists: “. . . some people in America seem gripped by the fear that there will not be enough American (read white) babies” (285). Ironic, when we know that Margaret Sanger advocated abortion and birth control for precisely that reason.

Note well: Madame Restell is hardly an obscure figure: Check her lengthy Wikipedia pages. She has “inspired” or been a character in several novels, and is the subject of a play (Wickedest Woman). Her life and activities have been well researched and documented in numerous articles and books by pro-life journalist and historian, Marvin Olasky. So why this book now?
In her Acknowledgments, Wright reveals that her subject was conceived backwards: She thanks her agent for helping her “refine my vague idea that ‘someone should write a book about how abortion has always been common’ into this specific book.” So Restell herself was a second thought, a subject chosen for the mission.

Not surprisingly for a “cause” book, Madame Restell has not been reviewed critically, as Wright’s other books have been. For example, a Kirkus review of her 2017 book Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them says she should have “banished” her use of “cool” and “fun” in this “lightweight history” and “There’s no question that Wright has covered a lot of medical history with good information, if only she had curbed her pontification.” But in 2023, she receives lavish praise for her uber pontificating: Her new book (Kirkus again) is “A fresh contribution to women’s history,” a “sharp, lively biography . . . not only interesting but, sadly, timely.”

To sum up, I cannot express better why not to read this book than Wright herself does in her Epilogue—though she believes she is bucking the trend she describes:

“By and large, Americans don’t like learning history. They like learning propaganda.” Bingo.

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Original Bio:

Maria McFadden Maffucci is editor in chief of the Human Life Review.