\u201cUntil the early 19th century, there were so few prosecutions of people providing abortions that it\u2019s very hard to understand how concerned people were about the practice,\u201d she says. \u201cThey did not seem terribly concerned that this was a widespread societal issue. General public opinion seemed quite tolerant of young women and their decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Simply put, if Sarah Grosvenor had lived, Dayton says, charges would not have been brought.<\/p>\n
Children wrestle with family control<\/strong><\/p>\n Life in the mid-to-late 1700s was different than today.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the exception of a relatively small number of port cities, society was heavily rural,\u201d retired UConn history<\/a> professor Christopher Clark says. \u201cNearly 90 percent of the population of the United States lived in the countryside after the Revolution, and many of them lived from the land in one way or another.\u201d<\/p>\n Slavery was legal, albeit stronger in the South than in the North, and the Industrial Revolution was just beginning to take root, Clark says, which meant mechanized machinery hadn\u2019t made its way to most towns and villages in rural America, so working with one\u2019s hands was the way to get things done.<\/p>\n It was a time of survival, nation building, and establishment.<\/p>\n \u201cMost people had to work long hours to survive or earn their livings, but that doesn\u2019t mean they weren\u2019t concerned about things like courtship, marriage, pregnancy, and child-raising,\u201d he says. \u201cOne of the interesting things about the late 18th century, particularly in New England, is that there is evidence premarital sex was common. People didn\u2019t write about this, and we can\u2019t interview them, but one way we can measure the occurrence rate is to look at birth records and compare them with marriage records.\u201d<\/p>\n Doing that shows a quarter to a third of first-born children were to couples who had been married fewer than nine months, he notes, proof of premarital sex. One might blame a lack of restraint on the part of these young adults caught up in a hormonal rush, but that\u2019s likely not the whole explanation.<\/p>\n \u201cFamilies tended to have greater control over the marriage of their children \u2013 particularly if they were females. And one way you could get around your parents prohibiting you from marrying a person was to become pregnant with a child by them, in which case the couple would have to marry,\u201d Clark says. \u201cIs this a lack of restraint among early American teens or too much restraint among their early American parents?\u201d<\/p>\n Historians are inclined to believe the latter.<\/p>\n Clark says that literary authors by the late 1700s and early 1800s, like Jane Austen, started to question the purpose of courtship and marriage – should these partnerships be for romantic intent or functional arrangements.<\/p>\n \u201cParticularly with the rise of the Romantic novel in England and other parts of Europe,\u201d Clark says, \u201cthere was a focus on the wishes of young people as distinct from the wishes of their parents and the notion that marriage need not necessarily be a dynastic question. Jane Austen, in all her novels, deals with this question. Do you marry the person with money, or do you marry the person you love?\u201d<\/p>\n Not in dire trouble<\/strong><\/p>\n Sarah Grosvenor and Amasa Sessions conceived their child sometime in late February or March 1742 \u2013 whether out of love, lack of inhibition, or another reason.<\/p>\n \u201cMost young people in this society at the time were pregnant before they got married so there was a lot of premarital sex happening,\u201d Dayton explains. \u201cMost of them married, and even if the couple did not agree to marry and the man went off, the young woman was not usually in dire trouble. She was not rejected by her parents. If she came from a farming, middle-class family, she often kept the child. She apologized before her church and was fined in court. In addition, my research shows these women went on to marry someone else in a few years and often her new husband informally adopted the child.\u201d<\/p>\n She continues, \u201cit\u2019s a mystery why these two young, white people from prominent families in Pomfret went to such great lengths to hide the pregnancy from their families \u2013 even from Sarah\u2019s own father and stepmother – and then end it.\u201d<\/p>\n A dedicated history department website<\/a> that details Dayton\u2019s research and the timeline of events<\/a> indicates Sarah Grosvenor learned she was pregnant in mid-to-late May \u2013 when the fetus was between 10 and 13 weeks\u2019 gestation and still a few weeks before she would have felt its first movements. She told Amasa Sessions, and almost immediately started taking the trade at his urging.<\/p>\n \u201cEthnologists and others who are experts on Native cultures of New England think there\u2019s pretty strong evidence that Indigenous women had methods to control births,\u201d Dayton says. \u201cIndigenous women were quite good at spacing children more widely apart than settler women. We\u2019ve often wondered to what extent Indigenous women passed on knowledge to settler women.\u201d<\/p>\n Nancy Shoemaker, UConn history professor and author of the 1999 book \u201cAmerican Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century,\u201d says that indeed Native Americans used birth control, but mostly after conception.<\/p>\n \u201cThe most common form of limiting births available to Indian women was abortion achieved with the use of plant abortifacients or pressure applied to the woman\u2019s abdomen,\u201d she writes, noting that in 1826 the Cherokee Council outlawed abortion among the tribe and the Senecas also prohibited it in the early 1800s.<\/p>\n But that came much later than Sarah Grosvenor, by eight decades, and coincides with other similar societal changes in the United States around that time.<\/p>\n The secret among Native American women, whether by design, necessity, or accident, was the length of time they breastfed their children, Shoemaker says. Breastfeeding generally equates to lower fertility because of inhibited ovulation, which would naturally space births \u2013 and if done only by accident offer the illusion of family planning.<\/p>\n Still, this wasn\u2019t lost on some settler women.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though we talk about the pill and how amazing it was in the 1950s, family planning and birth control were very normalized prior to that among European settlers,\u201d says visiting UConn faculty member Elisabeth Davis, who this fall is slated to teach \u201cColonial America: Native Americans, Slaves, and Settlers, 1492 to 1760.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBreastfeeding was considered an easy way of family planning,\u201d she says. \u201cWomen breastfed their children not only until they were a year old like we do today, but until they were toddlers. It was a very natural way for people such as Anne Hutchinson to pace how often they had children.\u201d<\/p>\n Anne Hutchinson, a Puritan who lived from 1591 to 1643, a century before Sarah Grosvenor, gave birth regularly every 18 months over the course of 25 years, Davis says. Even Thomas Jefferson\u2019s daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, who lived from 1772 to 1836, was successful at spacing her children between two and four years apart.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s not unusual,\u201d Davis explains, \u201cbecause it gave women an opportunity to raise a child who is more likely to survive during this time of massive childhood mortality.\u201d<\/p>\n Breastfeeding was an easy and natural way to do this \u2013 although not always guaranteed and perhaps only for a delayed time. Sometimes, a woman needed to look to other methods, and, Davis says, that wasn\u2019t much further than her own backyard.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the 18th century, you have separation of women\u2019s work and men\u2019s work. Women\u2019s work was in the garden, so many women were very skilled herbalists. They used herbs they had available as a form of early abortion, what they called getting their menses started again, as a form of birth control. You learned it from your mother and your mother learned it from her mother,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Even Benjamin Franklin published a recipe for an abortifacient<\/a> in the book \u201cThe Instructor.\u201d The book contains a section on at-home medical remedies for things such as gout, but there\u2019s also an entry with instructions on how to restart a woman\u2019s monthly cycle using herbs and plants from the garden.<\/p>\n \u201cIf your humors are out of sync, you would take an herb and it would cause a miscarriage, or an abortion by our standards today, but back then it was just getting your body regulated,\u201d Davis says.<\/p>\n Clark agrees, \u201cThere was not a lot of concern about early stage abortion in this time. The concern was, if there was one, what damage an abortion would do to the woman.\u201d<\/p>\n A medical abortion in 1742<\/strong><\/p>\n Around the middle of July 1742, six to eight weeks after she started taking the trade, Sarah Grosvenor felt the first flutter of movement, known as quickening and which happens between 16 and 20 weeks\u2019 gestation. She turned ill, and by the end of the month, still sick, was in the care of Dr. John Hallowell.<\/p>\n Amasa Sessions conceded to marry her, according to Sarah Grosvenor\u2019s sister, and promised to publish the banns \u2013 only, he reneged, and their intent was never publicized. Instead, in early August, Amasa Sessions fetched Dr. John Hallowell to attempt a medical abortion.<\/p>\n \u201cWe assume this wasn\u2019t common,\u201d Dayton says. \u201cWe don\u2019t know how many people attempted to miscarry or abort, and we assume that if they did, they tried nonsurgical methods. We learn more about surgical abortion in the 19th century. There was no germ theory at this time; people didn\u2019t understand that for another 130 years or more. Procedures were done and none of the participants washed their hands before the next one.\u201d<\/p>\n Certainly, this was not a time of sterile conditions, never mind surgical precision.<\/p>\n Dr. John Hallowell, with a past that included an arrest for counterfeiting, was unsuccessful in removing the fetus, not surprising for someone without a medical education. He sent Sarah Grosvenor home to recuperate; after a few days she miscarried in her father\u2019s chamber with her sister by her side. Accounts differ on whether the child was half-term or full-term.<\/p>\n For about a week Sarah Grosvenor rested comfortably, even gaining strength to do light work around the family house, until she again turned ill in the middle of August and lingered about a month until her death.<\/p>\n The story doesn\u2019t stop there. Abortion before quickening was legal at the time, but just before her medical abortion, Sarah Grosvenor had felt movement and as a result of the procedure she did die.<\/p>\n![\"Illustrated](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/UConnToday-Illustration-2-300x169.png\")
![\"illustration](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/UConnTodayIllustration-SarahGrosvenorGrave-300x300.png\")