Meet Ingeborg Andreas Blundell: Bay Ridge’s midwife, nurse, and abortionist for over a half-century. Practicing from the 1910’s through to the 1960’s, Ingeborg was a Jordmor: a Norwegian midwife. Operating out of her apartment on 92nd street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, she oversaw a private clinic for women’s reproductive health: delivering babies, caring for mothers, and, illegally providing abortions. Her story has been lost to history, until today.
Join Rachel as she interviews co-host Dan about his never-before-revealed research into the hidden history of reproductive rights in Bay Ridge, spanning over a hundred years. Along the way we’ll reveal how an entire apartment of working-class Bay Ridgeites defended an immigrant healthcare provider in court. We will discuss how the Norwegian feminist movement and radical Communist healthcare providers educated a trailblazing midwife. And we’ll discuss tragedy, tribulation, and hope in the face of an increasingly chauvinist legal and medical establishment.
It’s a story about how, in defiance of the law, women’s reproductive rights has always been a key component of Bay Ridge’s identity.
Content Warning: This episode features in-depth discussions of abortion, as well as references to maternal mortality, pregnancy complications, and infant mortality.
Additional Reading
If you’d like to learn more about some of the topics discussed in this episode, we recommend the following articles and books as a starting point:
- Sogner, Sølvi. “Abortion, Birth Control, and Contraception: Fertility Decline in Norway.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 34, no. 2, 2003, pp. 209–34.
- Buell, Samuel W. “Criminal Abortion Revisited” New York University Law Review, 1991, pp. 66
- Goodwin, Michelle. “The Racist History of Abortion and Midwifery Bans” ACLU, 2020
- Reagan, Leslie J. “When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973” University of California Press, 2022
- Schanberg, Sydney H. “Albany Bill on Abortion Reform Attacked by Protestant Senator” New York Times, 23 Feb 1967
Audio Bookmarks
Quickly jump to key parts of the episode by clicking the links below…
Show Transcript
Coming Soon!
This episode was recorded on October 12th, 2024 with Daniel Hetteix and Rachel Brody in our studio located in beautiful Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. All post-production and editing was done by our producer, Daniel Hetteix.