Abortion has been an inescapable fact of life for millennia. The question is, why do women gain or lose control over their reproductive lives at different times in history?

Linda Greenhouse
September 25, 2025 issue, NY Books (published online Sep 5)

“Abortion has long been an option for women, as far back in the historical record as we can see,” Mary Fissell, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, informs us at the start of Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion, her eye-opening account of undesired pregnancy and its intentional termination across the millennia.

Imagine if Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), in which the Supreme Court repudiated the right to abortion, began with those words instead of his presumptuous first sentence: “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” I say presumptuous because while Alito and the four justices who joined his opinion—all raised in the Catholic Church—no doubt do believe that abortion presents a “profound moral issue,” that is not a view shared by all Americans, many of whom believe that forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term is where the moral problem lies.

Continued: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/09/25/abortions-long-history-linda-greenhouse/