There is a widespread modern misconception regarding the term Puritan. Today many people believe good Puritans abstained from all sensual pleasures, and certainly before marriage. Actually, the religious denomination now known as Congregationalist acquired the label "Puritan" for reasons that had nothing to do with moral purity in the modern sense. The movement arose in seventeenth-century England with the purpose of purifying the government-sanctioned Church of England of its Catholic vestiges; hence the name "Puritan."
Unlike today every young woman of the provincial middle class knew that her "character"---her reputation for chastity---was all she had. even a sliver of suspicion that she had compromised herself with a man who had not pledged to marry her might doom her chances of ever finding a partner.
In "Puritan" New England one-third of brides were pregnant on the day they married. Marriage for women meant continuous rounds of pregnancies, nursing, infant deaths/child rearing. Death in childbirth was common enough that many colonial women regarded pregnancy with dread. In their letters, women often referred to childbirth as "the Dreaded apparition," "the greatest of earthly miseries," or "that evil hour I look forward to with dread."
In addition to her anxieties about pregnancy, an expectant mother was filled with apprehensions about the death of her newborn child. The death of a child in infancy was far more common than it is today. In the healthiest seventeenth century communities, one infant in ten died before the age of five. In less healthy environments, three children in ten died before their fifth birthday. Puritan minister Cotton Mather saw eight of his fifteen children die before reaching the age of two.
Today, most women give birth in hospitals under close medical supervision, if they wish, women can take anesthetics. During the seventeen century in colonial America, the typical woman gave birth to her children at home, while female kin and neighbors at her bedside to offer support and encouragement. When the daughter of Samuel Sewall, a Puritan magistrate, gave birth to her first child on the last day of January, 1701, at least eight other women were present at her bedside, including her mother, her mother-in-law, a midwife, a nurse, and at least four other neighbors.
During labor, midwives administered no painkillers, except for alcohol. Pain in childbirth was considered God's punishment for Eve's sin of eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Women were merely advised to "arm themselves with patience" and prayer and to try, during labor, to restrain "those dreadful groans and cries which do so much discourage their friends and relations that are near them."
After delivery, new mothers were often treated to a banquet. At one such event, visitors feasted on "boiled pork, beef, fowls, very good roast beef, turkey-pie, [and] tarts." Women from well-to-do families were then expected to spend three to four weeks in bed convalescing. Their attendants kept the fire place burning and wrapped them in a heavy blanket in order to help them sweat out "poisons." Women from poorer families were generally back at work in one or two days.
In her book When Abortion Was a Crime, Leslie J. Reagan writes that abortion has been a common procedure -- "part of life" -- in America since the eighteenth century, both during the slightly more than half of our history as a nation when it has been legal and during the slightly less than half when it was not.
Christians are typically anti-abortion with some exceptions. Exceptions void the argument the fetus is human life therefore abortion is murder. The condition of the fetus or the manner of conception such as rape or incest do not define the fetus. Human life is human life.
