With the Intention of Producing an Abortion: Criminal Abortion as a Cause of Early Death in St. Louis, Missouri, 1875-1885

-          When Annie Roberts died from complications from an abortion performed by Dr. William Stapp in 1878, the St. Louis coroner’s jury and criminal court charged Stapp with homicide.  In so doing, they overlooked Roberts’ decision to have an abortion to protect her reputation—even if it killed her.  Using coroner's inquests, criminal court records, and newspapers, this paper examines the alleged homicide of Annie Roberts by comparing and contrasting it to other death investigations.  Roberts’ case shows that the divisions between homicides, accidents, and suicides were not as neat as coroners’ verdicts suggest.  In fact, Roberts’ death was more similar to accidental deaths than to homicides.  Roberts sought Stapp’s help to procure an abortion, much like other women in this study who performed abortions upon themselves, whose deaths were ruled as accidents.  Surprisingly, even though the St. Louis press and her neighbors depicted Roberts as “sinful” for engaging in premarital sex and becoming pregnant, the court and press simultaneously treated her as a victim of a “quack” abortionist, showing that gender operated in a complex, even contradictory manner for women in late-nineteenth-century St. Louis.  Examining Roberts’ death investigation provides a way to understand abortion in the context of gender, sexuality, and the criminal court system, unlike previous historical studies which have focused on feminism, contraception, and physicians’ practices.  As other historians have passionately argued, understanding the causes and consequences of illegal abortion in the late nineteenth century matters because women are in danger of resorting to illegal abortion once more.