User:Lydiaseliano/sandbox

Abortion laws in the 1850s during Berengera Caswell's surgical abortion were rather contradictive. Common law states that women were allowed to have abortions up until the 'quickening,' the first movement of the fetus that can be felt by the mother usually is between thirteen to sixteen weeks after conception. However, the Maine statutory law does not allow abortion at any stage. Although the law does not explicitly deny women access to abortions, it restricts what the doctors can provide in terms of abortions. Any doctor who successfully provided drugs, medications, abortion tools (wires), and surgeries for abortion, was sentenced to either a maximum jail sentence of five years or a hefty fine and one year in jail. This Maine statutory law was not to punish the women seeking abortions, because this was a social custom back then, but to regulate the physicians providing abortions. The lawmakers were trying to keep the women seeking abortions healthy by ensuring that potentially lethal and unsanitary procedures were not performed by self-proclaimed doctors, who had none to minimal medical knowledge and training. The doctors, who were on trial for abortions, needed to prove these performed operations had the goal of killing the fetus. After the trial of the murder of Mary Bean, whose real name is Beregera Caswell, the abortion laws become more strict and punishing women more than physicians. It can be foreshadowed during the court hearings, as there is a noticeable shift of blame from the doctor to Berengera. The witnesses focus more on her dangly earrings and sense of fashion than the clues that tie the doctor to her murder.