Author looks at how witches and healers provided abortions
Sophie Saint Thomas is a New York writer with a penchant for combining funny observations and comments to accompany entertaining history.
A new book looks at the intersecting history of witchcraft, abortion, and birth control.
Reproductive Rites: The Real-Life Witches, Witch Hunts in the Centuries-Long Fight For Abortion, written by Sophie Saint Thomas, takes readers through the ages as they look at how ancient Egyptians, medieval dwellers, and colonial Americans viewed abortion providers as people with supernatural–and often perceived as evil–powers.
Thomas is an award-winning journalist and six-time author in New York City. Her writing focuses on sex, love, drugs and queer subculture.
The book's earlier sections are written entertainingly and cheekily and combine historical research with Thomas's apparent wit in connecting modern mores with historical customs.
One of the more exciting aspects was the depiction of ancient Egypt. Women–and this may seem discomforting to modern readers–used crocodile dung as suppositories to end a pregnancy during that era. That detail came from the Kahun Papyrus, Egypt’s oldest medical text.
The Greeks also got attention. Silphium, an extinct plant, was used as an abortifacient, the historical term for medicine, herbs, or agents that triggered a miscarriage. Soranus of Ephesus, a Greek physician, recommended silphium as a birth control method and for abortions.
Thomas also makes bold claims about Augustine of Hippo, perhaps the most critical theologian in Catholic history. Augustine is the writer who developed the concept of original sin, which is the belief that the biblical figure of Adam, who conceived with Eve, passed down the evil to later generations that came from them biting the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
I’m not a practicing Catholic. So, if that description doesn’t suffice for Augustine, feel free to email me with suggestions on edits. Many people associated with Catholics for Choice probably have more they’d want to add.
Thomas lays out evidence that Augustine may have been bisexual by citing his quote, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
Some of the work is linked to previous scholarship. She cites historian Wolfgang Mueller, who wrote The Criminalization of Abortion in the West: Its Origins in Medieval Law, to establish how medieval lawmakers treated the issue. Because the black plague had devastated Europe, many influential people wanted to promote fertility and procreation as much as possible to ensure the human race survived. So, abortion developed a stigma during that period.
Later in the book, Thomas discusses Native American treatment of abortions. The Shoshone and Navajo people used stoneseed as a form of birth control. One healer named Annie Mad Plume Wall of the Blackfeet in Montana used medicinal plants and ritual practices for reproductive health. Bodily autonomy was considered part of their relationship with the sacred realm.
She also explores Madame Restell, who was a famous abortionist who has been profiled in two recent books, one by Jennifer Wright and the other by Nicholas Syrett. Thomas is wrong about Restell being lost to history until Wright’s work. Several previous scholars, including Clifton Browder, had told her story. What Wright’s and Syrett’s work has–as is the case with many abortion rights scholars now–is the benefit of the advancement of research technologies to give a fuller picture of who she was.
That’s an important point to understand when analyzing the work of trailblazing feminists, who often produced work that surpassed modern writers, even though they didn’t have access to WorldCat, the Internet, or newspaper repositories like newspapers.com.
The challenge of completing the historical narrative in Thomas’ book appeared later. It isn’t easy to know where to end a story like this. Do you stop in the Salem era? Do you continue up through the ages and then link to modern people?
Thomas chose the latter approach. She links the antiabortion movement of the 1980s with the paranoia over Satanism during that time. Some of the arguments could have been stronger in connecting historical witchcraft with the modern antiabortion movement. There was no mention of the New Apostolic Reformation, which characterizes LGBTQ and reproductive rights leaders as demonic.
There are also some questionable inclusions of details about Hillary Clinton’s Methodism and a quote in which the former presidential candidate said she was personally against abortion. The context of the remark wasn’t included, nor any details about the policies her husband enacted as president or that she supported as both an officeholder and candidate.
It’s a book worth reading if you want more exciting discussions at gatherings of reproductive rights supporters. The book is available on Amazon.