La Voisin, the 17th-Century Witch Who Ran a Huge Abortion Network in Paris

La Voisin helped women get abortions, which were illegal in 17th-century France, where the Catholic Church had significant influence over the country’s laws. Sound familiar?

By Danielle Han
April 17, 2026

Catherine Monvoisin (commonly known as La Voisin) was born in 1640—but in many ways, it feels like she belongs to the year 2026. She enjoyed telling fortunes; was anti-king enough to (almost) kill off Louis XIV; and despite living in a time when abortion was illegal, was not afraid to provide women with life-saving care. Per some records, it also seems like she slept with a good fraction of Paris. Good for her! If she were alive today, I’m sure we would have been great friends.

Alas, she died at 40, when she was executed for alleged witchcraft, after failing to murder King Louis. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

Continued: https://www.jezebel.com/la-voisin-the-17th-century-witch-who-ran-a-huge-abortion-network-in-paris

Did the Anti-Abortion Movement Begin in Ancient Rome?

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)

04.03.2026

Film, Art, Books

Augustine’s “Confessions”

history of abortion

Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women

Sarah Ruden

Global

United States

Australia – An important anniversary in the history of women’s reproductive healthcare

Michael Carrette, Caroline de Costa, Philip Goldstone, Mukesh Haikerwal
Issue 6 / 16 February 2026

February 2026 marks the twentieth anniversary of the overturning of the Harradine Amendment by the Federal Parliament in 2006. Thanks to the efforts of many people across the country, this parliamentary action opened the way for a cascade of reforms in abortion care for Australian women.

The 1996 Amendment to the 1989 Therapeutic Goods Act was a political measure initiated by Brian Harradine, independent senator for Tasmania, who held the balance of power in the Senate during the Howard government and who was a hostile opponent of abortion. At the time, mifepristone (better known then as RU486) had been used in Australia only for a small clinical trial by Monash professor David Healy. Harradine made a deal with then Prime Minister, John Howard — he would support Howard’s bill to privatise Telstra and in return Howard would bring in legislation forbidding the import, manufacture or use of mifepristone in Australia without the express permission of the Health Minister. The Amendment was passed and had the effect of completely blocking efforts to introduce mifepristone for medical abortion in Australia, despite increasing use of mifepristone in many overseas countries and its proven safety.

Continued: https://insightplus.mja.com.au/2026/6/an-important-anniversary-in-the-history-of-womens-reproductive-healthcare/

The Politics and Ethics of Abortion in Ancient Greece

By Philip Chrysopoulos
February 15, 2026

The issue of abortion in Ancient Greece was multifaceted, intersecting with law, ethics, medicine, social ideology, and family structure. Contemporary debates add further layers, involving considerations such as individual rights, state regulation, the fetus’ personhood, household authority, and the continuity of civic life as central organizing principles.

In her 2013 paper Abortion in Ancient Greece, historian Laura Pepe explores this topic with particular attention to the Greek city-states, especially Athens, framing abortion not merely as a medical or ethical issue but as a social and legal phenomenon closely linked to fatherhood, property rights, and the political autonomy of the Athenian male citizen.

Continued; https://greekreporter.com/2026/02/15/abortion-ancient-greece/

15.02.2026

Commentary

abortion in ancient Greece

Against Antigenes for Abortion.

USA – After “Abortion”: A 1966 Book and the World That It Made

“We were all considered slightly cracked, if not outright fanatics, that first year.” —Larry Lader, Abortion II

Nov 4, 2025
By Karen Weingarten

“Abortion is the dread secret of our society.”1 So began journalist Larry Lader’s controversial book, Abortion, published in 1966 after years of rejection from publishers. If you had told Lader or the mere handful of activists then dedicated to legalizing abortion that a Supreme Court case would overturn anti-abortion laws across the US seven years later—in a January 1973 case named Roe v. Wade—they probably would have laughed. In fact, in the early 1960s when Lader began researching, it was harder to get an abortion in the US than it had been in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1966, American doctors—who were overwhelmingly white men—tightly controlled women’s reproductive options. And women of color, primarily Black and Latina women, had even fewer choices if they found themselves accidentally pregnant. Nearly 80 percent of all illegal abortion fatalities were women of color—primarily Black and Puerto Rican.2 And, worst of all, as Lader documented, deaths from illegal abortions had doubled in the preceding decade.

Continued: https://www.publicbooks.org/after-abortion-a-1966-book-and-the-world-that-it-made/

USA – ‘Good Genes,’ Anti-Abortion Laws, Declining Birth Rates, and What They Have in Common

Liz Parker, Common Dreams
Oct 12, 2025

… in America, promoting good genes and limiting access to birth control and abortion are inextricably tied by two threads: white supremacy and the patriarchy. And they have been for more than 150 years—ever since the first time abortion was criminalized in America in the late 1800s.

In the words of Leslie Reagan (author of When Abortion Was a Crime): “White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among Protestant women.”

Continued: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/anti-abortion-history-us

12.10.2025

Commentary

American Medical Association

When Abortion Was a Crime

Criminal Intimacy: Colorado’s complicated history with abortion

Maeve Conran
August 6, 2025
Podcast series in 3 parts (24 to 34 minutes each)

Criminal Intimacy is a limited series podcast by Abby O’Brien that explores Colorado’s complicated history with abortion. It tells the story of two women in 1870s Colorado — one with a tragic fate and one who took the blame. Fredricka Baunn, died in 1871 following an abortion, and Dr. Mary Solander, Colorado’s first licensed female doctor and a respected physician in the area, was found guilty of manslaughter for Fredricka’s death.

Fredricka Baunn had been impregnated by Clement Knau, a married man who did not want the child.

Continued: https://kgnu.org/criminal-intimacy-colorados-complicated-history-with-abortion/

06.08.2025

Interviews/Podcasts

Abby O'Brien

Colorado Doula Project

Criminal Intimacy

Dr. Mary Solander

Fredicka Baunn

Gina Martinez Valentina

history of abortion

history of abortion in Colorado

Abortion: A History – book review

An ambitious attempt at a history of abortion from antiquity to today is valuable and interesting, but does not consider the structures behind the patterns of change, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

17 July 2025
Elaine Graham-Leigh
Mary Fissell, Abortion: A History (Hurst & Company, 2025), vii, 288pp.Mary Fissell, Abortion: A History (Hurst & Company, 2025), vii, 288pp.

Throughout European history, women have sought to end their pregnancies. Against this constant, the attitude taken to abortion by authorities has fluctuated, with periods of repression vying with periods where abortion is accepted or at least tolerated. Fissell’s history of abortion in Europe and in America after colonisation attempts to track the ebbs and flows of repression and toleration of abortion from the ancient world to the present day.

For Fissell, the shifts for and against in attitudes to abortion over the centuries are linked to ‘larger shifts in gender relations, in the ways a society expects men and women to behave’ (p.4). This formulation doesn’t quite express the clear connection between repression of abortion and the control of the reproduction of labour through women’s oppression, seeming to reduce it to culture or interpersonal relations. It is true, as Fissell states, that ‘abortion restriction has often been gender backlash’ (p.4) but locating it purely in cultural attitudes to women’s behaviour has the effect of hiding the structural nature of abortion restriction as part of women’s oppression.

Continued: https://www.counterfire.org/article/abortion-a-history-book-review/

17.07.2025

Australia – To put an end to the abortion wars, we need mass struggle

Issue: 187
1st July 2025
Judy McVey

The global surge of attacks on abortion rights has been a wake-up call for pro-choice activists in Australia.1 In June 2022, thousands rallied in solidarity with women in the United States when Roe v Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court. Many media commentators argued that Australia was different from the US and abortion rights were safe here. After all, between 2002 and 2023, regional governments around the country removed abortion from criminal laws. Decriminalisation reflected community-wide popularity for legal abortion. Polls show that more than 80 percent of Australians believe “abortion should be legal and available in Australia in all circumstances”; anti-abortion sentiment is generally less than 10 percent.2

However, the bigots do not simply acknowledge defeat and disappear. Anti-abortionists inside and outside mainstream parties in Australia were emboldened by the rise of the far right and anti-abortion politics in the US and Europe.

Continued: https://isj.org.uk/abortion-wars-australia/

Canada – She Wanted to End Her Pregnancy. Her Abusive Partner Took Her to Court

The legal case that won Canadian women the right to abortion

by Karin Wells
Jun. 4, 2025

They met at a RadioShack in Montreal in November 1988. She was barely twenty, a waitress new to the city. He was five years older, a big man, six foot three, with a moustache. He seemed nice enough.

Chantale Daigle might have been a young, small-town girl—she was from Chibougamau, eight hours north of Montreal—but she knew her own mind. She lived with Jean-Guy Tremblay for five months, and it turned out he was not so nice. She got pregnant. One night, he knocked her to the ground and said that he would “bring her into line once and for all.”

Continued: https://thewalrus.ca/she-wanted-to-end-her-pregnancy-her-abusive-partner-took-her-to-court/