Ye Olde Abortion
I originally wrote about this topic in this post about Justice Alito’s leaked decision to overturn Roe v Wade. He made some bold claims about the history of abortion that were flatly wrong. We are still fighting to get abortion access back, of course, so this is still important information to know (and it’s interesting!).
Abortion has always been a part of the human experience. It was often handled quietly amongst women and midwives and I think this is part of the reason we assume abortion has always been controversial - because men wrote most of our history and they could only record the parts they were privy to (and interested in). But abortion has long been considered a normal part of healthcare so it’s important to learn more about the history of it.
If you want to learn more about abortion in general, check out my Abortion Facts post.
Ok, ready to learn? Let’s break it down!
Biblical Era
Most of what the Bible says about abortion is through discussion of laws rather than discussion of the morality of abortion itself. But even in the legal discourse, a fetus was never granted “full legal and moral personhood,” according to Biblical scholar Dan McClellan (1). He discusses an example in the Bible which describes two men fighting. In one scenario, the two men accidentally injure a pregnant woman and end her pregnancy and in the second scenario, they accidentally kill the woman, too. If the fetus is killed, the guilty party is required to pay a fine to the father of the fetus, indicating that the fetus is property belonging to him. However, if the woman is also killed, the punishment is “life for life,” indicating that the mother’s life is more valuable than the fetus (1). This shows us that life before birth was not seen the same way it is today. McClellan goes on to talk about this more in depth so check out his video linked in the sources.
Further, in Jewish tradition, as shown above and even to this day, life is considered to begin at first breath, not at conception.
Sources in the Talmud note that the fetus is “mere water” before 40 days of gestation. Following this period, the fetus is considered a physical part of the pregnant individual’s body, not yet having life of its own or independent rights. The fetus is not viewed as separate from the parent’s body until birth begins and the first breath of oxygen into the lungs allows the soul to enter the body. (2)
The Middle Ages
Abortion in the Medieval Era was handled in the courts at times, just not quite in the way that modern people might expect. For example, there are cases in which people are prosecuted for terminating someone else’s pregnancy, and there are cases where a person is charged in the death of the mother as well when the abortion agent did more than it was expected to. But there aren’t really examples of cases in which people were charged for their own abortions (3).
There is, however, ample evidence that abortions were quite common. This article in Scientific American, which is fantastic (CW: gruesome medieval medical practices), says this in its introduction.
While official legal and religious opinions condemned the practice, often citing the health of women, a wealth of medical treatises produced by and for wealthy Christian women across the Middle Ages betray a radically different history—one in which women had a host of pharmaceutical contraceptives, various practices for inducing miscarriages, and surgical procedures for the termination of pregnancies. When it came to saving a woman’s life, Christian physicians unhesitatingly recommended these procedures. (4)
Colonies/Early United States
In this Era, too, abortions happened without much controversy. “Medical literature and newspapers in the late 1700s and early 1800s regularly referred to herbs and medications as abortion-inducing methods, since surgical procedures were rare” (5). It was not until the middle of the 1800s that abortions began to be legally restricted (5).
It’s important to note, however, that this access to abortion didn’t apply to enslaved Black people, whose bodies were owned by white slaveholders who felt entitled to the next generation of free labor. Wealthy white women, on the other hand, have always been able to afford to travel and skirt the law to get abortions. (5)
Around the time of the Civil War, male doctors wanted to gain control of the work being done by midwives and, backed by the Catholic Church, they lobbied for outlawing of abortions. By 1910, abortion was outlawed across the nation. (4)
Conclusion
It is easy to view the world we live in as having been constant throughout history. Certainly the most common discourse in the US over abortion indicates it has always been shunned and shamed. It is assumed that where women had no rights to property, they also had no autonomy over their reproductive choices, but we can see from examining the evidence that this is a misunderstanding of history and that abortion has always existed, and, for the most part, has not really been contested or even considered. How backwards are we, then, that we are more medieval than the actual people of the Medieval era?
There are a lot of arguments as to why abortion is valid and important medical care - you can read more at the Abortion Facts post - but this historical context is also important. As long as people keep pretending or assuming that abortion has always been vilified, we cannot begin to earn our autonomy back from the icy grip of the cishet white men who wish to limit it.
Homework Assignment:
Go follow Jessica Valenti (Twitter / Instagram / Tiktok / Substack). She is a feminist writer who focuses on abortion in her newsletter, Abortion Every Day and on her socials. Keep appraised of abortion in the news and actionable items you can do to help.
