The best books that unearth abortion’s hidden history

This book is one of the reasons why I became a historian.

Ulrich uncovered the nearly illegible diary of an eighteenth-century midwife in Maine and included excerpts of the original at the start of each chapter. When I read the excerpts, I thought: How could these possibly be significant and what do they mean, anyway?

And then, like a detective, a gifted mind-reader, and a learned botanist all rolled into one, Ulrich unpacked each entry, weaving each snippet into the fabric of a wide textile of social history that includes reproductive history, gender and marital relations, local economies, political conflicts, and religion.

Abortion and abortifacients play a marginal role in the story Ulrich tells, but the history of midwifery and reproductive health are central to it. 

I appreciate Christopolous’ book because he renders concrete the abstract realm of papal pronouncements by studying their reception by sixteenth-century Italian women and their confessors. He also unearths the complexity of attitudes to abortion that existed even within the church establishment in this period.

When Pope Sixtus issued a 1588 edict declaring all who aborted their pregnancies were automatically excommunicated and reserving the right to absolve them to the papacy alone, bishops across Italy’s Renaissance states objected. They argued that neither they nor their confessants could afford to travel to Rome to seek absolution; they sought mercy and forgiveness for the women to whom they ministered.

With this example, and in other parts of his book, Christopolous treats his subjects with sensitivity and precision.

Londa Schiebinger adopts a highly original premise in this book by casting a plant, the flos pavonis or “peacock flower,” as the central protagonist of the story she tells.

In this book, she presents in rich detail the story of how enslaved Africans and Indigenous women regularly and effectively used this plant to abort unwanted pregnancies. While the peacock flower itself was quickly transplanted into the Old World, knowledge of its abortifacient properties did not accompany its movement.

Cassia Ross captivatingly conveys the stories of the individual women and girls, most of them financially desperate, whom the modern Brazilian state’s policing of women’s reproduction victimized.

Her book studies women’s reproductive health in Rio de Janeiro in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery (1888) and the dissolution of the country’s monarchy (1889). She argues that in this period, women’s reproductive capabilities became crucial to the expanding Brazilian state while the latter increasingly criminalized fertility control. 

Elizabeth O’Brien narrates the unexamined history of obstetrical surgery in Mexico, beginning with the late colonial history of the Catholic-directed emergence of a mandate to perform caesarean sections on dying or dead women to access and baptise fetuses before to ensure their eternal salvation. O’Brien then treats various groups, medical procedures, institutions, and events delineating the conflicted history of obstetrical care through the 1930s.

The episodes are fascinating and disturbing and include such instances as the 1901 riot of a group of women forcibly confined to Hospital Morelos for suspected venereal infection and a new medical procedure–“vaginal bifurcation”—a medical student designed in 1932 to allow for the temporary sterilization of pregnant women deemed imperfect reproducers.