Rebecca’s Reviews > The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime > Status Update

She actually sold products to Comstock twice before he came back with a warrant and police officer. The one the Comstock Laws are named after.

"The other problem for many observers was that her success led not just to wealth but also to independence. Brothel madams, some of whom also became quite wealthy, were similarly criticized and sometimes harassed and had their brothels ransacked. An independent female entrepreneur was a threat to the established gender order."

"She terminated the pregnancies of white, middle-class, married women at a moment when newly arrived immigrants had large families, which some nativists feared was the end of American civilization as they knew it."

"Her sins were legion: by terminating or delivering the pregnancies of single women, she contributed to immorality because she helped those women—and their seducers—hide the fruits of their sins. When she secretly found new homes for their illegitimate children, she helped hide the shame that the sinners should rightfully have been bearing."