Madame Restell was New York City's most notorious abortionist and self-made millionaire in the mid-nineteenth century. The Madame Restell Cases portrays five of her patients' difficult choices when they found themselves pregnant-either unwed or married with too many mouths to feed-and the woman who helped them. This collective biography presents a window into reproductive control in the Victorian era and into the lives of numerous unnamed women who sought to terminate pregnancies because they had no reliable means to prevent them. Madame Restell's patients' stories are part of women's history and the history of abortion in America.

Sharon DeBartolo Carmack is adjunct faculty of English at Southern New Hampshire University and serves on the editorial board of Steinbeck Review. Sharon is also a retired Certified Genealogist of thirty-five years. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing and postgraduate coursework in History, and her literary work has appeared in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Portland Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Steinbeck Review, Wilderness Literary Review, and Literary Hub, to name a few. The author of twenty-seven titles, her most recent book is Madame Restell: The True Story of New York City's Most Notorious Abortionist, Her Early Life, Family, and Murder (2023). She resides in Utah.