What Did the Pilgrims Think About Abortion?

Note: I’ve rewritten this post after coming across more evidence on the topic during my further research for my William Bradford biography. You can read the original post here.

Abortion is a hot topic in modern America. The history of abortion is long and complex, and well outside the scope of this blog post. I recently came across a claim in a PBS report by Professor Michele Goodwin that “The Pilgrims were performing abortions.”¹ The report has no evidence to support that claim and her book on abortion appears to not reference the Pilgrims.² It is a strong claim, and ought to have strong evidence to support it.

In this period of English history there was knowledge circulating in the society of herbs and techniques that could cause abortion. It is clear that some men and women sought out, attempted, and doubtless succeeded in aborting their children. Yet it is also clear that this was never publicly deemed appropriate in polite society. It was called, and widely viewed, as murder.³ If it was openly practiced by the Pilgrims, that would definitely go against grain of their culture.

The clearest reference to abortion that I have found in Pilgrim-related sources is in William Gouge’s Of Domestical Duties. This book was owned by William Bradford, and it contains a thorough Puritan theology of family life and responsibilities. Gouge warned women against being careless with their body during pregnancy lest they

cause any abortion of miscarriage … For if through their default, they themselves or their child miscarry, they make themselves guilty of that miscarriage, if both miscarry, they make themselves guilty of the blood of both; at least in the court of conscience before God. But they who purposely take things to make away their children in their womb, are in far higher degree guilty of blood; yea even of willful murder. For that which hath received a soul formed in it by God, if it be unjustly cast away, shall be revenged.⁴

It is clear that Gouge strongly opposed abortion and viewed it as a grave crime in God’s eyes. While Gouge was not a Pilgrim, and just owning his book does not prove that they agreed with him. There are references in the writings of the Pilgrims to very related topics that shine light on the question of whether they agreed with Gouge. 

Towards the end of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation he includes several position papers written by the pastors of Plymouth colony some two decades after their arrival in response to a request for advice from the Massachusetts Bay colony on how they should handle some crimes of child abuse and homosexuality that had been discovered. While answering those questions, Charles Chauncy, future president of Harvard, wrote this on the issue of abortion:

[T]her is no express law against destroying conception in the wombe by potions, yet by anologie with Exod 21:22, 23 we may reason that life is to be given for life.⁵

In this passing reference Chauncy argues not only that abortion by drugs be illegal, but that it be punished by the death penalty. One issue that complicated some historical discussions of abortion was the concept of quickening. Before ultrasounds some doctors taught that the child was not alive in the womb until the mother could feel it move – the “quickening.” So would they have permitted abortion in the first four months of pregnancy? I would suggest no. Bradford himself, when discussing the corrupt past of Rev. John Lyford said of his rape of a woman that “though he satisfied his lust on her, yet he indea[v]oured to hinder conception.”⁶ Since even an attempt to hinder conception was condemned, it would be natural to assume that abortion at any stage was considered wrong.

While I have not found any direct condemnation of abortion by a Mayflower Pilgrim, yet all the evidence points in that direction. It was frowned upon in all sectors of polite English society, Puritan pastors the Pilgrims respected wrote against it, and Bradford opposed taking measures to hinder conception. When historians like Professor Goodwin claim that the Pilgrims supported abortion, and do not present any firm evidence to prove the point, we are well justified in rejecting their statements as those of progressive wishful thinking rather than solid and factual history. 

1. John Yang, “Exploring the complicated history of abortion in the United States,” PBS News Hour. May 6, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exploring-the-complicated-history-of-abortion-in-the-united-states. Accessed September 16, 2024.
2. Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood by Michele Goodwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). On Google Books.
3. David Cressy. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 47-50.
4. William Gouge, Of Domestical Duties (Puritan Reprints, 2006), p. 368.
5. William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647. edt. Worthington C. Ford et al., 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912)., vol. 2, p. 325.
6. Ibid, vol. 1, p. 417