Abortion in History: Questioning the Stigma

There is a common misconception that before about 1960, abortion was rare, always

condemned, and usually deadly. Abortion opponents use this idea to justify their efforts

to restrict or ban abortion as a natural return to “the way things used to be.”

However, abortion is not a “modern problem.” It isn’t a problem at all, and it certainly

isn’t modern. There is ample historical evidence dating back to the first civilization in

ancient Mesopotamia that women in every society and every era have practiced

abortion. Abortion predates recorded history, and humans are not the only ones to do it.

As Cat Bohanon details in Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of

Evolution, scientists have observed female chimps in Sudan eating the leaves from

Ziziphus and Combretum plants to limit their fertility, the same plants women use in this

region to induce abortion.

The assumption that people throughout history unilaterally condemned abortion is

usually based on the Church’s current stance on the topic. People assume—and

indeed, clergy often insist—that the Church has been against abortion from the very

dawn of Christianity. This isn’t the case: although it is true that influential Church fathers

like Augustine of Hippo condemned abortion, “abortion” at the time had a different

definition.

Before about 1800, the word “abortion” usually only referred to a termination taking

place after animation, ensoulment, or “quickening,” aka the moment when fetal

movement can be detected by the mother around four or five months into a pregnancy.

An abortion taking place in the first few months of a pregnancy was not considered

abortion; it was a necessary and routine part of women’s healthcare, and there was no

stigma attached to it.

During the Middle Ages, a late period was seen as a serious problem that required

medical intervention. A late period, as we know, is most commonly caused by

pregnancy. They were aware of this in the Middle Ages, but because a pregnancy

wasn’t really thought to start until about month four or five, the months between a

missed period and “quickening” were a gray area when a woman could have an

abortion with no legal or social repercussions. Simply put, it was nobody’s business but

her own.

Medical manuals, almanacs, and even common household recipe books from the

Middle Ages onward are full of home remedies people could use to induce abortion.

This knowledge was not taboo, and a lot of it was recorded and preserved by the

Church. In the twelfth century, St. Hildegard von Bingen explained how and when to use

abortifacients in her book Physica, and in the thirteenth century, Pope John XXI

published Treasury of the Poor, a medical guide for common people that included no

fewer than twenty-four recipes for DIY abortifacients.

Popular cookbooks and household medical guides written for popular audiences often

included recipes for abortifacients under euphemisms like “to provoke the flowers.”

Used in baths, inserted into the vagina, or taken in drops as a decoction, recipes varied

by region based on the availability of ingredients. For example, German women used

chamomile, French women used parsley, and Americans used horseradish and Seneca

snakeroot, among dozens of other plants that have since been found to inhibit fertility.

Doctors prescribed savin, an oil taken from juniper, and other remedies could be

obtained from apothecaries, midwives, and even grocers. Abortion was freely

discussed, and it was not a “secret” limited to women: numerous court cases have

demonstrated that men also knew how abortifacients worked and were often involved in

facilitating abortions for their partners, friends, or families.

Recent clinical trials suggest that many of these herbal abortifacients were more

effective than you might think. While it is true that some of them were so toxic that they

resulted in miscarriage, that was not the case for all of them. Many plants used in

historical abortifacients have been found to block progesterone or stimulate uterine

contractions, much like how abortion pills work today.

In the nineteenth century, as the first serious laws against abortion were being passed

in Britain and the United States, over-the-counter abortifacients were sold everywhere.

They were advertised in every newspaper and available at every chemist. Many of

these so-called “female pills” contained the same ingredients women had used for

centuries—plants like pennyroyal, aloe, and ginger. Unfortunately, many of these pills

also contained additives like soap or toxic substances like arsenic and lead, leading to

serious medical problems or even death. The first laws against abortion were not to

protect the fetus, but to prevent women from being harmed by untrained doctors or

dangerous, unregulated abortion drugs.

Despite the dangers of self-managed abortion, a staggering number of women were

willing to take the risk. By the 1890s, when abortion was illegal in the United States, 1 in

3 pregnancies ended in abortion. As Leslie Reagan found in When Abortion Was A

Crime, women continued to openly discuss abortion and exchange tips for inducing it

despite legal restrictions. Banning abortion did not end abortion; it only increased the

numbers of women who died trying to end their pregnancies.

The current stigma around abortion is not rooted in history. It only really began with the

Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion in the mid-nineteenth century, a decades-long

campaign driven by misogyny and racism. As the Women’s Suffrage Movement gained

momentum, more women were entering the workforce, going to college, fighting for their

rights, and delaying motherhood or limiting their family sizes for personal, professional,

or economic reasons. Abortion opponents feared what would happen if women took a

more active role in society and saw banning it as a way to keep women in their “natural”

place—pregnant, confined to the home, and excluded from public life. Horatio Storer,

the Boston gynecologist who started the Physician’s Crusade, dedicated his life to

banning abortion not because he was concerned about “fetal life,” but because he was

afraid that white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women weren’t having enough babies to

outnumber the immigrants coming to America. This was a common fear at the time, and

we’re seeing it coming back today with anti-immigrant rhetoric increasing alongside calls

to ban or limit abortion in America and Europe.

Abortion isn’t a modern phenomenon, but abortion stigma is. Abortion was common

throughout history, and even when it was condemned after the point of “quickening,” it

was always permitted when the woman’s life was at risk. With very few exceptions,

abortion was not illegal, and no one in their right mind likened it to murder. Abortion was

a routine part of women’s health care, and it was widely accessible and accepted as a

necessary, even mundane, part of everyday life.

Jessica Cale is an author and historian of contraception and abortion. She is the host of

the Dirty Sexy History podcast, and you can find her at dirtysexyhistory.com.