On the history of reproduction and healthcare with Mary Fissell and the new book Abortion: A History

Women have always sought to end pregnancies, and long succeeded. From classical Greece to Roe v. Wade, this long-overdue history of abortion tells their stories. We are honoured to welcome Mary Fissell to the bookshop, an expert on the history of reproduction, to discuss her urgent new book Abortion: A History.

From enslaved and Indigenous herbal knowledge on Europe’s colonial plantations to Planned Parenthood’s unlikely alliance with postwar churches, Mary Fissell reveals abortion’s long politics, tracing how Western societies have policed the practice—or chosen not to. For long periods in our past, abortion was widely tolerated by authorities and ordinary people, and far from straightforward in Christian morality: it was not a crime in Britain until 1803, nor a religious issue in America until the twentieth century.

Whether in France, Scotland, Germany or Italy, abortion controls have always sprung from wider panics around social change—whether times of war, revolution and economic upheaval, or patriarchal anxiety about women’s growing independence. As restrictions tighten once more, this vividly illuminating history reminds us that such repression never endures.

About our speaker:

Mary Fissell is a historian of medicine and an authority on the history of reproduction, particularly sex education and midwifery. She is a professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and was previously a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge. She has held affiliations with the Wellcome Trust and taught at the University of Manchester. The author of Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, among other works, she has appeared on the BBC and in Vice, Slate, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Fissell is currently working with a producer and a director to develop a four-part television series about the history of midwifery for the UK market.