Tracing the long history of abortion and criminalization

Despite a flawed analysis of the roots of women's oppression, In Abortion—A History by Mary Fissell widens the discussion around decriminalization

By Pauline Brady, Socialist Worker
Wednesday 07 January 2026

In Abortion—A History, Mary Fissell lays out a vast history of abortion across the world. She goes right back to ancient Greece, when abortion was as common as taking painkillers is now.

It is clear the perception of abortion has been significantly influenced by state-led women’s oppression and by religion, rather than the needs of pregnant people.

The book draws on transcripts and records that have survived for thousands of years. It is a great historical resource into how abortion has been weaponised to control the lives of women.

Continued: https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/tracing-the-long-history-of-abortion-and-criminalisation/

07.01.2026

Abortion’s Long History

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/

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

The past has been marked by periods of acceptance and intolerance of women’s bodily autonomy. Can it offer lessons for today?

By Sophie McBain
March 24, 2025

The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been. In a big city, filled with young migrant workers, there was clearly a lot of bed-hopping, and plenty of cads who could disappear and evade community pressure to arrange a shotgun wedding. A single woman who found herself pregnant and abandoned, however, had few good options. If she kept the baby, she would likely lose her job and be refused medical care. Places such as London’s Foundling Hospital would not care for babies left anonymously or born out of wedlock, because they did not want to be seen to encourage extramarital relations. Abortion was one solution, and pills were widely available in Victorian Britain and marketed using coded terms such as “female obstruction pills”, the obstruction referring to a delayed period. What made Wilson’s story unusual, then, was not that she had an abortion but that she died from one, after contracting an infection.

Continued: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2025/03/cyclical-history-of-abortion-rights

24.03.2025

self-managed abortions

Listen up, Trumpists – your idea of abortion’s history is all wrong

Mary Fissell’s fascinating book, Abortion: A History, whirls readers from Cicero’s Rome to 16th-century ‘witches’ to modern-day Ireland

Ella Whelan
01 March 2025

“A beautiful thing to watch”: that’s the phrase Donald Trump used to describe the slew of anti-abortion bills passed by American states in 2022, after “Roe v Wade”, a 50-year-old legal judgement in favour of abortion rights, was overturned by the US Supreme Court. While Trump’s personal views on abortion are unknown – over the decades, they’ve swayed with the breeze of whatever has made him popular – his recent words, not to mention the views of his vice-president JD Vance and their evangelical supporters, are the sort you hear described as “from the dark ages”. Abortion-rights activists, in fact, tend to make this kind of distinction: the “pro-choice” movement is progressive and future-oriented, and the “pro-life” (or “anti-choice”) crowd are stuck in the past.

But, according to a new book by the American historian Mary Fissell, the Trumpists’ view of abortion – “heartbeat bills”, no mercy for rape victims, a focus on the “unborn” – isn’t even an accurate representation of the past (whether that past is idolised or despised). In Abortion: A History, she charts a different timeline.

Continued: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-mary-fissell-abortion-history/

The Underground Network Fighting for Teen Abortion Access in Texas

How a group of nonprofits in Texas is working together to usher minors across state lines for crucial reproductive care

By Olivia Rockeman
Aug 28, 2024

Throughout their early teens, DakotaRei Frausto struggled with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of premenstrual syndrome, as well as anemia and chronic nausea. In 2021, at age 16, Frausto went to a handful of clinics in their home state of Texas to seek out a birth control prescription, hoping it would help address their symptoms. But each of the clinics brushed off their pain or referred them to brochures rather than getting them in front of doctors, and Frausto, feeling defeated, gave up on trying to access birth control.

Soon after, when Frausto was 17, they started to experience more severe PMDD symptoms than usual. A pregnancy test confirmed they were eight weeks pregnant. “When I did test positive, I knew for a fact abortion in Texas wouldn’t be an option for me,” Frausto said, noting that the state’s six-week abortion ban went into effect in September 2021. “My immediate next thought was: How am I going to scrape together the resources to travel?”

Continued: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a61973788/the-underground-network-fighting-for-teen-abortion-access-in-texas/

The History Behind Arizona’s 160-Year-Old Abortion Ban

The state’s Supreme Court ruled that the 1864 law is enforceable today. Here is what led to its enactment.

By Pam Belluck
April 10, 2024

The 160-year-old Arizona abortion ban that was upheld on Tuesday by the state’s highest court was among a wave of anti-abortion laws propelled by some historical twists and turns that might seem surprising.

For decades after the United States became a nation, abortion was legal until fetal movement could be felt, usually well into the second trimester. Movement, known as quickening, was the threshold because, in a time before pregnancy tests or ultrasounds, it was the clearest sign that a woman was pregnant.

Unlocked: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/health/arizona-abortion-ban-history.html

An 1873 law banned the mailing of boxing photos. Could it block abortion pills, too?

BY: JENNIFER SHUTT
APRIL 5, 2024

WASHINGTON — An anti-obscenity law enacted in 1873 that hasn’t been enforced in decades shot to the forefront of the nation’s abortion debate in the past week thanks to two U.S. Supreme Court justices, amid expectations a future Republican president would use the law to order a nationwide ban on medication abortion.

The Comstock Act, which prohibited the mailing of anatomy textbooks and boxing photographs as well as contraceptives, drew fresh attention after Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas during March 26 oral arguments seemed to suggest the law would block the mailing of mifepristone.

Continued: https://missouriindependent.com/2024/04/05/an-1873-law-banned-the-mailing-of-boxing-photos-could-it-block-abortion-pills-too/

Library archives uncover long-lost history of Colorado women dying trying to get an abortion before it was legal

By John Daley
Mar. 7, 2024

Abortion access — some states have outlawed it, others have seen scores of patients from out of state — has been in the news since the U.S. Supreme Court repealed the Constitutional right to an abortion two years ago. But looking back through history shows that unplanned pregnancies and access to abortions have been in the news for a long, long time.

More than a century ago, readers of the Rocky Mountain News learned about the death of a young woman who worked in a shop named Maude, who was trying to terminate a pregnancy. A woman named Mrs. Proctor, the wife of the manager of a “remedy company,” was charged with manslaughter in Maude’s death.

Continued: https://www.cpr.org/2024/03/07/denver-public-library-history-of-abortion-access-in-colorado/

USA – Measuring the long-term cost of restricting abortion access

By Annalisa Merelli
Oct. 17, 2023

When Diana Greene Foster and her team at the University of California, San Francisco, started their study on the lives of women who were denied abortions in 2008, they sought to investigate a rather commonly held view: That having an abortion hurt women’s mental and physical health, including by leading to PTSD and drug and alcohol use disorder.

A series of laws had been passed based on this belief, introducing compulsory counseling and waiting periods for people seeking abortions, thereby adding barriers to accessing the procedure, especially for patients with lower incomes who couldn’t afford repeated time off work, travel, and associated costs such as child care.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2023/10/17/harms-from-restricting-abortion-access-research/

17.10.2023