Abortion: A History w/ Mary Fissell
London
WC1E 6EQ
Join us for an evening exploring abortion’s long history, with author of Abortion: A History, Mary Fissell.
‘A surprising and ultimately optimistic history. Expertly researched and deeply empathetic.’ — Leah DeVun, author of The Shape of Sex
‘Vital reading. Fissell tells the story through vivid, engaging and often alarming accounts of real women who tried to end their pregnancies.’ — Helen King, author of Immaculate Forms
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.
About the author
Mary Fissell is the inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on sex, gender and reproduction. The author of Vernacular Bodies, among others, she has featured on the BBC, and in Vice, Slate, The Washington Post and The New York Times.