Professor researches ancient abortion methods

Johns Hopkins University Professor Mary Fissell to release book in early 2025 about abortion throughout the ages

Mary Fissell has researched abortion dating back to antiquity through the era of antibiotics. She plans on releasing a book in early 2025 about the topic. 

Fissell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, specializes in early modern medicine and its intersection with gender studies. The title of the impending book is Long Before Roe, which Basic Books will release. She said there are two important takeaways from it. 

“Women have always terminated pregnancies as far back as we can go,” Fissell said. “And second, that prohibition never works. It never actually stops women. It just doesn't work. It creates a lot of misery in the short run. It stops some individual women, but it doesn't actually change the practice.” 

Fissell’s research has specialized in English history. She said there was relative silence on abortion despite how widespread it was. It was occasionally in medical books, but criminal charges seldom appeared in courtrooms there. 

Newspaper advertisements in America and elsewhere carried advertisements for emmenagogues, which were herbal remedies that brought on menstruation. 

Abortion was often stigmatized because it was associated with illicit sex and unmarried women who people felt shouldn’t be having sex in the first place. It was shameful. 

“We can't assess the countless abortions that took place safely that were never recorded,” Fissell said. “I see no reason to believe that married women were not also aborting sometimes. That's been true everywhere else we can find. But that never really entered the historical record.” 

Medication abortion was commonplace during that time. They were known as abortifacients. Some were more reliable than others in inducing abortion. Surgical abortion didn’t really become commonplace until antiseptic techniques took over the medical profession and made such procedures safer. 

In my own research, that was one of the reasons that people began calling for legalized abortion. The ban had originally been in place because antiseptic techniques hadn’t arrived and many women died from people using instruments that weren’t sterile. 

It’s complicated insofar as at what point abortion wasn’t permitted. In ancient Greece, it was when there was a ‘formed’ fetus, or when it had developed to the point where it had taken a form. Aristotle thought that the male fetus was formed at 30 days and the female was formed at 42. 

In the Middle Ages, Christianity began thinking that the soul entered the body during the quickening, which was the point of fetal movement. Thomas Aquinas supported that view. 

“They see this as a fundamental divide,” Fissell said. “And that divide just goes on and on and on.”