An ancient entertainer robbed of her livelihood while pregnant; a medieval holy woman performing a ‘miraculous termination’; an abortion provider prosecuted as a witch during the Reformation; a Victorian midwife saving her patients from the workhouse. Women have always sought to end pregnancies, and have long succeeded. This book tells their stories.
From enslaved and Indigenous herbal knowledge on early plantations to Planned Parenthood’s unlikely alliance with postwar churches, Mary Fissell reveals abortion’s long politics, uncovering how Western societies have policed the practice—or chosen not to. For long periods in our past, abortion was widely tolerated by authorities and ordinary people, and far from black and white in Christian morality: it was not a crime in Britain until 1803, nor a religious issue in America until the twentieth century. But those histories of calm have been punctuated by moments of acute repression—as we’re seeing today.
From France and Scotland to Germany and Italy, abortion controls through the centuries have always emerged from wider panics around social change—whether times of war, revolution and economic upheaval, or patriarchal anxiety about women’s growing independence. As restrictions tighten once more, this vividly illuminating history reminds us that such limits never endure.
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Mary Fissell is the Mario Molina Professor in the department of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Fissell has appeared on the BBC and has been cited as an expert in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, and Vice. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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