Hiding in Plain Sight: Recovering Histories of Pregnancy Loss in the Late 19th-Century South

In December 1875, a jury of inquest investigated a case of suspected infanticide in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Charlotte Observer reported that the suspect, Annie Albright, a Black domestic servant had given birth in secret and then left her employer, carrying the infant’s remains away in a basket. But as the tale unraveled, the story became more complicated. Upon investigation, the jury determined that it was unlikely the infant had been born at full term. Rather, the remains were the product of different kind of pregnancy loss: a medical abortion induced by drugs. The person who had provided those abortifacients was a traveler, Lewis Cooper, well known in towns throughout the state as the “Indian Doctor.” As the threads of the tale unspooled, local officials arrested Cooper, while allowing Albright—still under investigation, although not under arrest—to convalesce from her recent pregnancy loss at the home of a local friend.

The intertwined narrative of Annie Albright and Lewis Cooper illustrates the challenges of uncovering abortion histories in the late nineteenth-century south. Building on the historical scholarship that demonstrates the complexity of American attitudes towards the practice in the past, this paper argues that those viewpoints have long been obscured because of challenges associated with recovering histories of abortion. Indeed, as the case of Annie Albright illustrates, the ongoing conflation between infanticide and abortion, which emerged after the Civil War as anti-abortion activists sought to reframe abortion as a form of murder, has obscured cases of abortion in the historical record making them harder for contemporary historians to find. Drawing from newspaper accounts and court records of such interwoven cases, this paper interrogates how popular understandings of both crimes both shaped understandings of, and obscured understandings of, abortion in the late nineteenth-century south.