Soon-to-be-released book focuses on how abortion evolved over the ages
Professor Mary Fissell has taught about ancient abortion methods and will now showcase her research to a growing audience of people interested in reproductive rights history.
A new book details the history of abortion dating back to antiquity. Along the way, it deals with how the politics and culture surrounding it developed to be more or less tolerant.
Mary Fissell, whom I interviewed last year, will publish Pushback: The 2,500-year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion on March 11, 2025. It is now available for presale on Amazon.
It begins by delving into how sex workers in ancient Greece needed abortions to continue to be able to carry out their profession. Unsurprisingly, it went into the details covered by other books about how silphium was a commonly used abortifacient. The plant was a herbal remedy that has gone extinct, likely from overuse. One wonders, with all the ability to genetically engineer, if silphium could grow again if it could be brought back in the modern day, and if there were traces of it found in the soil of these areas.
Predictably, abortion was used to cover up illicit and embarrassing affairs that women were caught having with men who were not their husbands. That was the first time it was associated with what would be considered tawdry behavior.
Many writers in the last century have discussed the Hippocratic Oath, which forbids giving women pessaries, or pills, to cause abortion. Pro-choice historians have said that had more to do with poisoning women with the medication than it did with outlawing the procedure itself since other medical texts at the time were associated with how to perform them. Hippocrates himself was said to have performed abortions.
St. Brigid of Kildare, one of the three Patron saints of Ireland, was also a historical figure associated with ending pregnancy. According to religious documents, one woman was pregnant but wanted a life of chastity, so St. Brigid helped rid her of the pregnancy. While prayer was given as the reason, it must have been abortion that was, in reality, the cause.
Fissell argues that the infrequency with which abortion was prosecuted was evidence that Middle Ages authorities tolerated the procedure. The punishment had more to do with having sexual affairs than believing the fetus was a person who had been murdered. It was also associated with Witchcraft, explored in further detail by another book I recently featured, Reproductive Rites: The Real-Life Witches and Witch Hunts in the Centuries-Long Fight for Abortion, by Sophie Saint-Thomas.
The evolution of church law about abortion in both Catholicism and Protestantism was covered in the book. Courts run by the Catholic church were commonly where abortion-related trials were held. As writer Gary Wills has theorized, fetuses weren’t considered human beings by Catholics until the mid-19th century, when Pope Pius IX issued a papal decree declaring that.
What I like about the book is that it focuses on abortion methods before the modern era. While my book and others discuss it briefly before moving on to the last 50 years, Fissell’s research focused on how it happened in Europe. Though Fissell dedicated a sizable portion of her book to the new world, I’d recommend Leslie Reagan’s landmark When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973, the standard text in women’s studies courses. Researchers such as myself have built on the work that Reagan began long before modern investigative and historical techniques developed. Fissell writes of abortion methods among Indigenous and enslaved women, which I have found fascinating in other writings, including that produced by Angela Davis, considered a radical writer in the 1960s who pushed boundaries about interpreting reproductive rights scholarship and history.
While the book takes a sizable portion to explain what many have studied, with the evolution of abortion law beginning with the procedure's primary opponent in the mid-19th century, OB/GYN Horatio Storer, I wish Fissell had focused more extensively on the law passed in England in 1861. The book’s primary strength lies in its emphasis on how it developed in the old world. That would have been useful for abortion rights activists in England, who are currently trying to repeal and replace that law that has led to several investigations and prosecutions of women in the last 10 years.
“Women have always terminated pregnancies as far back as we can go,” Fissell said at the time. “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.”