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This article explores several issues raised in writing history by means of a microhistory from the judicial archives. It focuses on one court case of abortion that involves ordinary people who experience difficult lives, and offers insights into an aspect of women’s private lives within the liminal terrain of the neighborhood, while also demonstrating relationships of power in the daily lives of men and women, even if their stories are almost always mediated by male members of the magistrate. Women’s voices were critical as they exercised some limited power when they took matters into their own hands, used their neighborhood networks, and acted on their own behalf in order to try to have some control over their intimate lives. The analysis reveals the hierarchy and dispersion of power within a complex relationship of gender, personal needs, community standards, state organizations and the cultural discourse of the moral republic of 1870s Paris.