In “Reproductive Wrongs,” the classicist Sarah Ruden traces efforts to exert political control over family planning back 2,000 years.

A 19th-century engraving depicting the Roman poet Ovid in a toga, framed by a decorative marble arch, holding a stylus in one hand and a tablet in the other.

by Jennifer Szalai
March 4, 202

Sarah Ruden is a translator, literary critic, cultural historian, classical philologist and Quaker. She also happens to be a blistering polemicist on the issue of reproductive rights, a talent she may never have realized if it weren’t for the steamrolling of those rights in our current political moment.

In “Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women,” Ruden recalls that she initially wondered if there was something “rather ridiculous” in taking on such a live-wire issue. She had been trained in close readings of Homer and Virgil; but the more she looked into historical efforts to exert political control over family planning, the more she realized that her philologist’s fascination with language could help her better understand the power of culture and ideology.

Continued: https://archive.is/Gk54S
(https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/books/review/reproductive-wrongs-sarah-ruden.html)