Abortion in 18th Century New England

Unsung History

In 1742, in Pomfret, Connecticut, 19-year-old Sarah Grosvenor discovered she was pregnant, the result of a liaison with 27-year-old Amasa Sessions. Instead of marrying Sarah, Amasa provided her with a physician-prescribed abortifacient, what the youth of Pomfret called “taking the trade." When that didn’t work to end the pregnancy, the physician attempted a manual abortion, which led to Sarah’s death. Three years later, the physician was tried for “highhanded Misdemeanour." The surviving trial documentation gives us an unusually detailed look into the reproductive lives of Connecticut youths in the mid-18th Century.

Joining me in this episode to help us learn more about the Sarah Grosvenor case and its historical context is Dr. Cornelia H. Dayton, Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and author of the 1991 article, “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village,” in The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 1, 1991, pp. 19–49, and co-creator of the Taking the Trade website.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The episode image is original artwork created by Matthew Weflen.

Additional Sources:

• “Abortion in Colonial America: A Time of Herbal Remedies and Accepted Actions,” by Kimberly Phillips, UConn Today, August 22, 2022.
• “The Strange Death of Sarah Grosvenor in 1742,” New England Historical Society.
• “The History of Abortifacients,” by Stassa Edwards, Jezebel, November 18, 2014.
• “How U.S. abortion laws went from nonexistent to acrimonious,” by Erin Blakemore, National Geographic, May 17, 2022.
• “In Connecticut, A Long Battle For Reproductive Freedom,” by Susan Campbell, Hartford Courant, June 5, 2014.

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