Billboard:
(sounds of sandhill crane fade in to sounds of birdsong and frogs by a creakside)
Tamara Dean from essay: On my land the past exerts itself. I slop through the channels left by long dead farmers, and let a field that was burned intentionally for centuries, burn its way back into prairie again. I've wondered about those who plowed planted trees and set fires. Now, Nancy reaches forward and casts me to conjure her.
(theme music fades in and ambient sound fades out)
Ariel Lavery: The history of childbirth in America is a hazardous one. Women were debilitated and often died during birth, leaving broods of young ones motherless. Then, just as today, women looked for ways to stave off pregnancy, sometimes, also, resulting in death.
Tamara Dean reading from Safer than Childbirth: I find more dead fertile women than old men.
(theme music swells)
Ariel Lavery: Today we’re going to hear from a writer who learned about America’s history of childbirth after discovering the life of a common woman, a woman who was buried on her own property many generations ago. This woman’s reproductive history, which includes the same decisions women have to make today, had been recorded and archived over a century ago and was just waiting to be rediscovered. This is, Conjuring Nancy, on Middle of Everywhere, telling big stories from the small places we call home.
Scene 1: Living in History
Tamara Dean: My name is Tamara Dean. I’m a writer and I live in Wisconsin. I write both fiction and nonfiction and I have for a long time. And I like to explore how the two meld and mix. And I don't believe there's any such thing as pure nonfiction. We're always taking a slant on something.
Ariel Lavery: In 2004 Tamara and her partner purchased 275 acres of property in rural Viola.
Tamara Dean: …on a small river in southwestern Wisconsin. And a lot of it was floodplain. Some of it was rich top meadow, some steep hills there. The township we lived in had 247 people or something. And we knew most of our neighbors and it was a lovely little community.
Ariel Lavery: You heard Tamara reading from her essay Safer Than Childbirth, at the beginning of this episode. The essay was published in The American Scholar in March of 2022 and is the enchanting product of her inquiry into the history of her land.
(ambient sound of property fades in)
Ariel Lavery: So all the audio you’ll hear of birdsong, whooping sand cranes, and croaking frogs is original to the property she owned for 16 years.
Tamara Dean: And we bought it because we fell in love with the beauty of the area.
(ambient sounds of property fade out)
Scene 2: Mystery Graves, Mystery Deaths
Tamara Dean: We were told almost as soon as we purchased the property, although not before, that there was a cemetery on our property. Our neighbor to the north had been cutting hay and he was taking a break, and he walked across the fence line. And he said, Did you know you have a cemetery on your property? We were out there at the time building a yurt which was our first small building project on the land. And we said no. And we asked him where it was. And he said, Oh, you can't miss it. But he never told us where so we spent months and months just traversing the property, wondering if we would stumble on it.
(ambient sound of walking through the woods)
Tamara Dean: And then we actually did, when we weren't trying, stumble over some of the gravestones that were left, but it was no longer maintained. So it was, you know, in an area at the edge of the floodplain field that was covered with Box elders, and these old daylilies, which I imagine somebody planted back there. There were only three gravestones left and one belonged to a small boy. And the other two were sisters who died in you know, either infancy or toddlerhood. And then there was this narrow marker that had just the initials M A S on it.
(ambient sounds)
Tamara Dean: Our neighbor told us, oh, there are all these Civil War soldiers in there, but those gravestones washed downstream in the flood of ‘78. So all the while we lived there, you know, for 12 or 14 years, we figured there were civil war soldiers buried there. Finally, in the fall of 2019, after we'd been living there 15 years, we’d owned the property by then, I went to the historical society in Vernon County to find out well, if there are Civil War soldiers buried there, I want to know who they were.
(ambient sounds of historical society)
Tamara Dean: I asked the assistant curator who was buried in that cemetery, if they had any records, and she did have this roster, but it was only five people and none of the names were men, none of them would have been Civil War soldiers. There were the three children whose headstones we had already found. And then there were these two women's names.
Tamara Dean reading from Safer Than Childbirth: I don't see any men's names. But there's the name of a woman I've never heard of. I read it aloud. Nancy Ann Harris.
Tamara Dean: And the woman sitting next to me who was researching her family’s genealogy said, oh she’s my husband’s great great great aunt. The stranger says she was married to Benjamin Franklin Harris who was my husband’s great great great uncle.
Tamara Dean reading from Safer Than Childbirth: She nods to her husband, who nods in confirmation. Astonished, I turned to face her. How do you know that? She died of an abortion, the stranger adds. Apparently she'd had a lot of them. How do you know that? Her death record. Why would they put that in the public record?
Ariel Lavery: This question, in Tamara’s mind, is what ends up taking her down a path of new understanding about the history of maternal care in this country.
Tamara Dean reading from Safer Than Childbirth: Carol, standing nearby, says, it was a different time. I want to ask her what she means. But another woman who has been eavesdropping leans toward me and frowns. That Nancy must have been something else she says.
(ambient sound of historical society fades out)
Tamara Dean: And from there on out, it felt as if this story was a series of revelations and almost in a destined way for me to discover. I just kept turning my head, it seemed thinking wait, what, what what and asking why?
Scene 3: A Series of Revelations
Tamara Dean: And I went to the Register of Deeds office in Vernon County where the death records are kept thinking, well, maybe everybody gets a long footnote to their death record here, I don't know. And once I opened the volumes, and Nancy's was one of the first recorded so they, that's about when death records began in that county. I saw that hers was long. And it went up the page, sort of like a pointed finger, like they didn't even have enough room in the appointed form to include all the information they wanted to include. So then I wondered why that had been. No other death records in all those volumes were as long as Nancy's and I thought, What's going on here? Either, you know, it's so exceptional that she had so many abortions that they had to make a note of it and or maybe this doctor is trying to make an example out of her.
(musical pause)
Tamara Dean reading from Safer Than Childbirth: The cause, “puerperal peritonitis”, is annotated by a triple-dagger symbol that directs the reader to a line of script rising up the margin like a pointed finger: “Disease caused by abortion at 3 months this was perhaps the 10th abortion all except this followed by smart hemorrhage.”
Ariel Lavery: Ten abortions by the time she died at age 35. By today’s standards, this could seem excessive, even abhorrent. But ideas about pregnancy and the beginnings of life were very different in a time before ultrasounds and heart dopplers.
Tamara Dean: They also didn't believe that a human life existed until quickening, which is basically when a woman can feel the fetus move, which happens about the fourth month of pregnancy.
Ariel Lavery: The language surrounding abortion did not focus on the expulsion of an embryo or fetus, but rather on the restoration of a woman’s good health, another of the revelations Tamara encountered.
Tamara Dean reading Safer Than Childbirth: Women spoke of it casually. They might decide to be put straight, opened up, or fixed. They wouldn’t have said abortion as that was a term that belonged to the medical lexicon, not the vocabularies of ordinary people. According to Reagan, one woman in 1918, after her menses were restored, said to her nurse, thank the Lord I have been relieved.
Ariel Lavery: Leslie Reagan wrote the book When Abortion Was a Crime, cited extensively in Tamara’s essay.
Tamara Dean: After reading the literature about abortion in the early 1800s, mid-1800s, and finding what records we do have: summaries or surveys, commentaries from medical professionals, legal professionals, or even diaries from women themselves. It seemed as if abortion was very common and it didn’t matter whether women were rich or poor, whether they were white or Mexican, or Black, whether they were Protestant or Catholic. Women were using abortion as a means of birth control in that time. And, you know, in the absence of other birth control, that certainly made sense. So they had no objection to it. They had access to it. And you know, it was something they could manage privately too, they didn't necessarily have to turn to a midwife or doctor to get an abortion.
(Sounds of woods from Viola)
Tamara Dean reading from Safer Than Childbirth: If she found an hour's respite from chores at her cabin, less than a mile from my place, where a tavern now stands, she might have asked her older step daughters to take care of her three younger children. She might have left the cabin, walked north over marshy ground, and found what she needed in the hills behind my place. Juniper, bloodroot, mayapple, Queen Anne's lace seeds in large quantities taken early enough, or black cohosh, a plant Native American women relied on.
(woods sound fade into sound of Tamara walking with friend Sheryl through Wisconsin woods.)
Ariel Lavery: I asked Tamara if she might be able to revisit the woods near her old property with someone who knew how to identify some of the herbs she wrote about.
Tamara Dean: …you know what it looks like?
Sherry Scott: Yeah, I mean, I certainly know what the flower looks like and leaves in spring…
Tamara Dean: So I contacted my friend Sherry Scott, who’s a public health professional but also very interested in herbal medicine. Sherry and I walked on her woods near the town of Gillingham, which is only about a half hour’s drive away from where I lived.
Sherry Scott: Oh, oh here’s some.
Tamara Dean: Sure. Absolutely!
Sherry Scott: Let me get the trowel.
Tamara Dean: Good eye!
Tamara Dean: We weren’t sure if we were going to find Bloodroot or Mayapple.
Sherry Scott: Oh! Cute little orange root.
Tamara Dean: It is. It’s not quite red, or bloody-colored.
Tamara Dean: We used a trowel and dug and we found the rhizomes that are very distinctive because when you crack them open or break them, this bright orange to red sap oozes out.
Sherry Scott: Ooo cool!
Tamara Dean: Ha. That’s juicy.
Sherry Scott: Oo yeah, look at that. That looks really bright red there. So how was that used?
Tamara Dean: I believe that they dry the roots and then make them into a tea or use them powdered up.
Tamara Dean: All parts of the bloodroot plant are considered toxic including that sap that comes out of the rhizomes. In fact, I read about some medicinal purposes for bloodroot that included putting the sap on warts or acne or even skin cancer lesions. But, you know, it’s sort of corrosive, this sap. It can burn you so you definitely would want to wash your hands after you’d handled some. The other thing that I found during my research was that not only do the plants vary from area to area and their qualities vary from area to area, but you know for centuries, Native Americans, and the pioneers later, or the settlers, later, used them for different purposes in different areas. So in Wisconsin, for example, I learned that the Ojibwe made throat lozenges from a little bit of the bloodroot compound and maple sugar cubes. So it was used as an antimicrobial, an anti-inflammatory, and then of course it was used by some tribes as a regulator of menstruation and an abortifacient. The most common method of preparation I found with all of the herbs, including the black cohosh, and the bloodroot, and the mayapple, were to collect the roots and then to dry them to make them into powders. And then I imagine, I mean I know, that they were made into teas, but I also imagine that they could have been sprinkled onto something or ingested with food. Similar to how we would make pills out of the gelatin forms or tablets surrounding the powder today. And black cohosh can be found on the shelf for, you know, advertised for help with all kinds of female trouble today.
Ariel Lavery: Knowledge of the medicinal properties of these plants was passed down from generation to generation. Children would have learned from their friends and family members how to prepare the herbs to treat the specific ailment. And this was, and is, a completely accessible form of self-treatment, if you know what to look for. Learning the long history of access to abortion in America was a surprise to Tamara. Growing up in the wake of the Roe v Wade supreme court decision created an awareness in her of its legal tenuousness.
Tamara Dean: I had the impression that the widespread availability and acceptance of abortion that had always been part of my life was a modern development.
Ariel Lavery: And attacks on abortion access in this country are also nothing new. When we come back we’ll hear about one of the most important pieces of this history.
Tamara Dean: Abortion was a moral issue. He compared it to prostitution.
(break)
Scene 4: History Revised and Women Removed
Tamara Dean: I had no idea that the AMA was originally behind the early anti-abortion legislation. But later I thought, maybe I should have known this and why didn't I know this?
Ariel Lavery: Welcome back. With a totally revised understanding of the widespread abortion access in the United States, Tamara began to learn about the first campaign to limit that access. The AMA, or the American Medical Association, is the single largest professional organization for medical doctors, with a continued mission “to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” But at the time of its founding, in 1847, it looked like a very different organization.
Tamara Dean: It was an organization for male physicians who had some formal schooling to distinguish themselves from other medical service providers including women doctors and homeopaths, and midwives.
Ariel Lavery: Print advertising was also just starting to become big business in the United States.
Tamara Dean: In the 1840s there were a whole lot more advertisements for abortifacient tinctures and pills and also abortion service providers in periodicals and newspapers. Following that, reporters became aware or alarmed and wrote these exposes on these abortion service providers. So it all became more evident to the public that women were seeking abortions. Also, the reporters of these exposes revealed that most of the clientele for the abortion service providers were primarily white, Protestant, US born, middle-class women.
Ariel Lavery: Women who were, at the time, seeking to advance their social status and possibly avoiding pregnancy and childrearing in order to do so.
Tamara Dean: The other factor is that birth rates among women who were white, middle class, Protestant, and born in the U.S. were dropping in a way that couldn’t be explained simply through celibacy, miscarriage or something else, and so the AMA doctors attributed this decline to an increasing rate of abortions. And that translated into a fear that their way of life would be threatened. That specifically white, Protestant, middle class Americans would be outnumbered by immigrants, Catholics and people of color as the country’s population grew.
Tamara Dean reading from Safer Than Childbirth: For regular physicians and legislators, denying women's right to continue practicing reproductive autonomy was an existential battle. If they couldn't control white, Protestant, middle class women, they would be outnumbered in the new world.
Ariel Lavery: Enter the good doctor, Horatio Robinson Storer.
Tamara Dean: Haratio Storer was a physician and the leader in the AMA. And he took it upon himself to promote white population growth essentially. Part of that was this anti-abortion crusade, and he wrote a book called Why Not to persuade women who were Protestant, white and middle class to bear children and not to choose abortions. He asked readers if the southern and western regions of the nation should be “filled by our own children or by those of aliens. And he added, this is a question our women must answer. Upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
Tamara Dean: So the campaign that Storer started led to criminalizing abortions state by state. And as AMA members they promoted these boiler plate or copycat bills to make abortions at any stage of pregnancy punishable by fines and jail for both the abortion providers and the women who had abortions.
Ariel Lavery: In Wisconsin, where Nancy Ann Harris died, the anti-abortion campaign was underway when Nancy was still just a child.
Tamara Dean: There was an 1848 bill that had made abortion after quickening illegal. But that didn’t change the status quo. That’s a bill that a lot of people today are referring to, the one that we would revert to.
Ariel Lavery: You heard that right. Wisconsin could now revert to a law that was ratified over a century and a half ago. After Roe was overturned the question of today is whether this bill is now Wisconsin law.
Tamara Dean: A lot of women, like Nancy Ann Harris, who was the subject of my essay, simply would have ignored it, especially women in rural areas. You know, this had been acceptable practice for so long, for virtually the whole time they were alive. They wouldn’t have taken note of that law.
Tamara Dean: It’s hard to know at all about how many abortions occurred ever in history because people weren’t keeping statistics because it was illegal. Or before it was illegal it was just simply a practice. It was another means of birth control. So the best data we have are from the time after which it was made illegal and then people were brought to court. I don’t think that-it sounds to me from my research that abortions didn’t decrease very quickly after these laws were in place state by state. You know in Nancy Ann Harris’s case she already had two stepdaughters, a son, and two daughters of her own. There’s no way she could have managed 10 more children.
Scene 5: Tamara’s Stake
Tamara Dean: I did feel sort of cast to conjure her. I felt selected. And the timing was, was strange.
(background audio from historical society fades in)
Tamara Dean: And then when I pursued her, you know, looking up her death record at the Register of Deeds office and then a little bit about her genealogy. There isn't much information about her. But I did find the stepchildren and children she'd had and her marriage and you know when of course when she died So I became closer to her through that. And I felt a deep sense of empathy, I mean not only sympathy for the way she died and the life that she had lived, the more I learned about that. But also a sense of closeness to her. She did live right down the corner from me at a spot that was so familiar from my walking and jogging and driving paths. And she very well could have walked up to the hills on my property to get what she needed. And it wasn't so long ago, you know. It was not even 200 years ago that she was there.
Tamara Dean: I wanted to share her story with readers because I thought, Well, I had been told that Civil War soldiers were in this cemetery and that theirs were the graves gravestones that had been washed downstream, when in fact, it was Nancy Ann Harris, and this other woman who also died from either a complication of childbirth or pregnancy or abortion. She had the same cause of death as Nancy’s. And I thought that's curious that legend in the area had it that men were buried there when it was really these women and, and they deserve the honor, the value and also the valor I would say of being immemorialized in an essay like this.
Tamara Dean: For a long while, childbirth was more dangerous than any of men's professions, including, you know, coal mining or anything else. And so even today, childbirth is more dangerous for a pregnant person than abortion. At that time, in the 1800s, there were so many ways for pregnancy to go wrong. And for childbirth to harm and kill, possibly even, you know, damage a woman for life. Women would have seen their sisters or their mothers, their cousins, their aunts, be debilitated, damaged or even killed by childbirth. So you can imagine what an impression that made on them. And some of them were frightened of childbirth as a result.
Tamara Dean: It is ultimately about, and it still falls under the umbrella of, women's reproductive autonomy. So women in the 1800s knew that this was the best way to manage their fertility. Those were the methods they had. And today we have different insights, technology, and means of both prevention and inducing abortions. But it's still a matter of a woman's best judgment for her own health, her family's well-being, her resources, everything that factors into it.
Conclusion:
Tamara Dean reading from Safer Than Childbirth: Nancy Ann Harris died on the 10th anniversary of her marriage to Frank. I'd like to think that Frank was out of his mind with grief. On the Sunday morning after Nancy’s death Frank would have left the tasks of bathing and dressing her to a female relative or friend. But he probably lifted her body into the coffin himself. Say the day was sunny, the ground lightly covered in snow when he hitched the horses. His two little girls rode with him in the wagon while his older daughters and son walked behind. They ferried the casket to the cemetery by the same route that Nancy might have taken to collect herbs. A bonfire had softened the newly frozen ground. A hole had been dug. A headstone was waiting. I would like to believe that Frank spent $5 he couldn’t really spare to buy the headstone and have it engraved with Nancy’s name, birth and death dates, plus a tree of many branches to symbolize the reach of her life through eternity.
Tamara Dean: This story is standing for something else now. You know, it's rooted in Nancy's life, but it carries meaning for many other lives. She's, she's representing a lot of other women now.
(musical pause)
Ariel Lavery: Tamara Dean’s essay Safer Than Childbirth, was published in March of 2022 in The American Scholar. You can find a link to it on our website and in our newsletter, which you can also sign up for online at middleofeverywherepod.org.
(pause)
Credits
Ariel Lavery: Thank you to Tamara Dean for collaborating on this episode with me: revisiting the historical society, going for walks in the woods, and recording herself reading her essay. This episode was produced by me, Ariel Lavery. Our editor is Josh Adair, who has been helping me craft this season while serving me coffee and homemade sweet breads. And thank you to Annie Davis, our intern, for helping with anything and everything we throw her way. You can find images of the plants we talked about in this episode on Instagram and Facebook at middle of everywhere pod and Twitter at rural underscore stories. Our theme music was composed and produced by Time on The String Sound Studio in Paducah Kentucky. Other scoring comes from APM music. This is a production of WKMS and PRX. This program was made possible, in part, by the corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private organization funded by the American People.