Abortion

A History

By: Mary Fissell

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Hardcover | 1 July 2025

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Hardcover
304 Pages

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23.4 x 15.6 x 3.0

Hardcover

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Attitudes about abortion cycle between long periods of widespread tolerance, to repression, and back again. What accounts for these pendulum swings? From ancient Greece to the modern West, historian of medicine Mary Fissell argues, abortion repression springs up in response to men's anxieties about women's increasing independence.

In Abortion, Fissell shows that, across centuries and continents, abortion has always been commonplace, and persecuting women for ending pregnancies has been about controlling their behaviour. As Protestantism de-emphasised celibacy, new abortion restrictions policed unmarried women's sex lives. Nineteenth-century men unsettled by first-wave feminism hoped to establish medicine as a male profession, and so advocated for abortion bans to undercut women's new roles as physicians. Fissell presents this history through the hidden stories of women committed to reproductive self-determination: holy women of the early Catholic Church whose ability to end pregnancies was considered miraculous, midwives accused of witchcraft or criminal conspiracy, and everyday women whose pregnancies threatened their livelihoods-and their lives.

This is essential reading for understanding the complex history of abortion and making sense of recent crackdowns on reproductive rights.

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