THE DISQUIETING DEATH OF EMMA GILL

Two 19th-century abortionists run from the law and the repercussions of a patient’s death in this nonfiction work.

In the wake of Roe v. Wade’s reversal, Biederman’s latest book focuses on the death and subsequent investigation of the murder of Emma Gill, a young unmarried woman from Connecticut who secretly sought an abortion in 1898; her body was found dismembered under a bridge. This historical account follows Henry and Nancy Guilford, a couple of unlicensed “doctors” who’d become some of the most notorious abortion providers across New England. Neither properly studied medicine, but they were ambitious and duplicitous enough to convince many desperate women to seek their services. Emma is thinly sketched, but her story reveals the ways communities, law enforcement, and the media perceived and stigmatized abortion. The author draws on an exhaustive collage of newspaper accounts, historical records, and archival research to not only animate the era, but to provide specifics about the extensive harm caused by regulating women’s bodies. Nancy’s eventual conviction for manslaughter for Emma’s death (Henry, who wasn’t involved with Emma Gill’s abortion, wasn’t charged) reveals how far abortion and sex education discourse has come (and recently regressed). Biederman’s economic prose avoids sentimentality (“A saloonkeeper’s wife, presumably with access to cash, would have received a warm welcome, particularly at that time. Nancy’s financial pressures were mounting”), and the narrative unfolds like a high-stakes crime novel. An afterword explains that the Guilfords’ trials and imprisonments did not dissuade them from continuing to give abortions.

A multifaceted, revealing historical account of one woman’s abortion.