What did the Founding Fathers think about abortion? Most of them didn't have anything to say... except Benjamin Franklin. Who published a recipe for inducing abortion (and also had a sockpuppet flame war about it).
Back in 1758, Benjamin Franklin published an instructional manual called The American Instructor or Young Man’s Best Companion. It was a selection of bits and bobs which Franklin described as matters "more immediately useful to us Americans." The book contained advice on all sorts of topics including writing, bookkeeping, arithmetic, basic health information - and among that was his recipe for inducing abortion.
The section in Franklin and his partner David Hall's book provides a method for treating "Suppression of the Courses" - in other words, not menstruating. This was a common euphemism for early pregnancy. The book says that missing periods are "a common complaint among unmarried women" and that missing periods is unhealthy. It then goes on to provide a remedy to this complaint. Franklin's recipe includes specific measures of herbs and a dosing regimen. One of the plants included is a plant with known abortifacient qualities which had been documented to have been used to induce abortion since antiquity. It also includes instructions to ride horses each day, a method was frequently used at the time to induce abortion. The section also appears to contain a warning to avoid men in future, saying "nor must they long for pretty Fellows, or any other Trash whatsoever".
Yep, Benjamin Franklin may have also said that men were trash.
Now onto the sockpuppet flame war. The practical advice on how to do it wasn't the only time Franklin had published something regarding abortion. In 1729, he manufactured a moral outrage about abortion when a rival had published an article about it in a newspaper.
Using the pseudonym (and, frankly, a fully fleshed-out character) Martha Careful, Franklin complained the article had "expose[d] the secrets of our sex" and threatened to "run the hazard of taking him by the beard… and make an example of him for his immodesty." He wrote a second letter as Caelia Shortface, another character he'd clearly put a lot of thought into, saying of the publisher "if thou proceed any further in that scandalous manner, we intend very soon to have thy right ear for it"
It may seem unusual to a present-day audience that abortion was spoken about fairly openly and even casually in the eighteenth century, but laws and regulations surrounding the practice did not exist at the time.
By the way, if you look up the full recipe, please don't try Benjamin Franklin's abortion instructions at home: at least one of the herbs he suggests is toxic.
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