“No Cheap Operation Performed”: Rural Abortion, Class Conflict, and the 1879 Trial that Upended an Indiana Farming Community

ABSTRACT: On August 25, 1879, nineteen-year-old Eliza Francis Levesay, the daughter of a tenant farmer, and twenty-five-year-old William Miers, the son of a prosperous landowner and farmer, traveled from rural Decatur County, Indiana, to the county seat of Greensburg. Eliza was pregnant, and local dentist Columbus C. Burns performed an abortion on the young woman. Eliza miscarried the pregnancy in her parents’ home days later, and Miers and Burns were charged by the Decatur County Court with procuring an abortion and second-degree murder. The trial garnered local, regional, and national attention. Using long-unknown court documents—including Eliza’s deposition, taken by the mayor of Greensburg—author Madeleine Boesche recounts a story of premarital sex and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, community standards and secrets, social class, and the practice of abortion in the nineteenth-century rural Midwest.