An industrious immigrant who built her business from the ground up, Madame Restell was a self-taught surgeon on the cutting edge of healthcare in pre-Gilded Age New York. Her bustling “boarding house” provided birth control, abortions and medical assistance to thousands of women --- rich and poor alike. Unfortunately for Madame Restell, her rise to the top of her field coincided with a campaign to curtail women’s power by restricting their access to both healthcare and careers of their own. By unraveling the misogynistic and misleading lies that put women’s lives in jeopardy, Jennifer Wright simultaneously restores Restell to her rightful place in history and obliterates the faulty reasoning underlying the very foundation of what has since been dubbed the “pro-life” movement.