Abortion

A Daily Telegraph 'History Book of the Year'‘Fascinating ... shows the resilience of women’s agency and autonomy, even in the darkest of times.’ — The Telegraph, five-star review‘An eye-opening account.’ — The New York Review of BooksFrom classical Greece to Roe v. Wade, a long-overdue history of abortion.An ancient entertainer unable to work while pregnant; a medieval holy woman performing a 'miraculous termination'; a Reformation-era abortion provider prosecuted as a witch; a Victorian midwife saving her patients from the workhouse. Women have always sought to end pregnancies, and long succeeded. This book tells their stories.From enslaved and Indigenous herbal knowledge on Europe's colonial plantations to Planned Parenthood's unlikely alliance with postwar churches, Mary Fissell reveals abortion's long politics, tracing 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 straightforward in Christian morality: it was not a crime in Britain until 1803, nor a religious issue in America until the twentieth century.Whether in France, Scotland, Germany or Italy, abortion controls have always sprung 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 repression never endures.Fully comprehensive and global in scope, this is the definitive history of abortion—and its politicisationFilled with numerous surprising vignettes, including the 5th century nun who performed the miracle of the ‘disappearing pregnancy’As modern-day abortion restrictions tighten once more, this vividly illuminating history reminds us that such repression never endures