Big Flora

By Philippa Monk

Abortion: A History

Mary Fissell, Hurst, 2025

Abortion’s history is long and oscillating. Cycles of often begrudging toleration follow harsh repression. The Greeks thought abortion mundane, the Romans found it decadent. In the sixth century, Brigid of Kildare was canonised for her performance of a miraculously painless abortion. In 1588 (and again in 1869) the Catholic Church declared that abortion at any stage of pregnancy was grounds for excommunication. The years immediately prior to the legalisation of abortion in the US saw Abortion Squads set up stings on well-respected doctors and illegally tap their patients’ rooms. With physicians under arrest, unqualified amateurs met the market’s unceasing demand. This demand is the only constant in Fissell’s book: women have always sought to control their reproduction. 

Before the twentieth century, abortion advice was given not by a doctor but usually by an older woman (variously called herbalist, healer, Sister, midwife, witch). In times of repression, networks of information became opaque — at least to the eyes of the prying priest, lawyer, historian. Knowledge was transmitted verbally. Fissell wishes we ‘could overhear — what was it that women knew, and how did they know it?’ Women spun stories of stomach aches, purges, obstructions to the apothecaries they consulted. Periods of toleration bred more openness: ‘obstruction pills’ were advertised in newspapers; recipes for abortion-inducing herbals were shared in a nun’s manuscript, a yearly almanac, even a maths textbook published by Benjamin Franklin (the latter proving false the Supreme Court’s statement that abortion is not ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history or tradition’). When it came, legalisation institutionalised open communication while confirming the specialisation of its mediators — abortions are only legal when approved and carried out or prescribed by biomedical professionals.

Today, abortions are again becoming private: the very recent development of abortions administered by physicians in public clinics is waning. Mifepristone and misoprostol (medications taken in sequence to stimulate abortion) are swallowed at home. Privacy — always desirable — is increasingly essential as violence at clinics becomes the norm. Fissell emphasises that ‘much has changed’, with private abortions now produced by ‘carefully titrated pharmaceuticals, not plants picked in the wild or bought from a market stall.’ But as intolerance grows, women are employing historic strategies to procure medications: mail-order, cover stories, secret consultations, charlatans, maybe even making drugs at home. In the UK, six women have appeared in court for suspected home abortions in the last two years, with more women subject to extensive criminal investigations following miscarriages. 

Fissell is ambivalent about whether her book ought to be labelled an ‘ode to the self-managed abortion.’ She is, however, determined not to become a source of “how-to” information on herbal abortions. Her introduction warns against trying any of the mentioned plants at home: ‘They can be deadly.’ Still, historians (Fissell included) have struggled to judge the safety and efficacy of herbal abortions. Successes and failures went unrecorded: ‘A woman survived and moved on.’ The danger of abortion was perhaps not different to the danger of childbearing for much of Fissell’s period. Little modern research on plants’ aborting properties exists. A review of existing pharmacological literature cited by Fissell suggests that the most common abortifacients — pennyroyal, savin, rue — do not stimulate the human uterus or result in abortion, except at fatal doses. A ‘d.i.y guide’ on The Anarchist Library says plants are effective but contain thujone, which in high concentrations causes delirium, hallucinations, convulsions, brain lesions, and epilepsy. Other plants may have been safer: the peacock flower in the West Indies, silphium (now extinct) in Libya, cotton root in the American South. Plants also had the advantage of being easily accessible. Sugar plantations in Barbados were ringed by walls of ‘flower fence’, or peacock flower. Enslaved women used its seeds and roots to evade their masters’ desire they reproduce. In Southern states, women chewed cotton root as a contraceptive. Using the literal roots of her master’s wealth, Mary Gaffney — forced to marry against her will — ensured that “I never did have any slaves to grow.” In Ancient Greece, herbs, administered orally or through woollen pessaries, made abortion ‘part and parcel of everyday women’s work’: foraging, cooking, spinning. 

Medical technologies substituted nature’s arbitrariness for surety. Instrumental abortions were the safer option from the nineteenth century onwards. They were also expensive. A woman in Baltimore in 1940 could pay a doctor $400, a local autodidact $75, or buy a ‘bluejay’ and some ‘footballs’ from the pharmacy ($4) and do it herself. Abortion remains expensive for those without insurance, free healthcare, or knowledge of funds: legislation has tended to enshrine the right to abortion rather than equality of access. In some states, the undoing of Roe vs. Wade was only a legal recognition of the de facto banning of abortion through defunding and increasingly restrictive qualifying parameters. 

Technological development precipitated abortion’s exit from domestic space, but technology needn’t by its nature have made abortion more expensive or harder to access. Misoprostol and mifepristone cost the NHS just 17p and £10.15 respectively. Together, they might cost a woman in the US as much as $600. In light of these complexities, Fissell’s concluding comments on legislation read somewhat naïve: “I hope that we can move beyond this long series of ebbs and flows of restriction and tolerance by enshrining rights to abortion in national law, wherever such laws are lacking.” But legislation alone has not and will not ensure equitable distribution of safety, risk, privacy, health, and choice.  

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The ‘ontological independence of the embryo and then foetus’, or problem of two bodies in one, is a recent innovation in abortion ethics. Until the nineteenth century, it was widely held that quickening (the moment a mother first felt movement in her womb, around 20 weeks) was the most reliable approximation of a process called formation: the spontaneous eruption of seed into something recognisably human and therefore alive. Before quickening, there was therefore only her body. (Formation began to be questioned through the study of chick embryology, where gradual development could be observed by opening eggs on sequential days. Diderot once wrote: ‘Do you see this egg? With it you can overthrow… all the churches of the earth.’) Complicating this even futher, women were encouraged to use emmenagogues to ensure regular periods; these uterine-stimulating herbs could also produce abortion, so that — with the absence of pregnancy tests — it was unclear to potential prosecutors whether a woman had intended to bring on a late period or an abortion. When pre-formation abortions were brought to trial it was not on account of a future baby’s claim to life but because the act of abortion represented the betrayal of a patriarch: father, husband, God, master. 

Medical technologies allowed litigious men access to the womb. In nineteenth-century England, doctors armed with stethoscopes claimed that they could detect formation through foetal heartbeat, thus displacing the role granted to women’s testimony of their own bodies in courtrooms. Then, microscopy proved once and for all that pregnancy was ‘a continuum, with no particular threshold at quickening.’ American medical journals began to employ the concept of ‘feticide’. This moralising served a greater purpose: elite doctors seeking to augment their clientele wanted to displace midwives from the mother’s beside. To this end, they used older techniques of exclusion alongside new technologies, arguing ‘that midwives, many of them immigrants, were dirty and superstitious, both immoral and dangerous.’

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For Fissell, the past is a salve for the present. ‘Living in such a deeply polarized moment,’ she writes, ‘means that we often leave little room for complexity. It is either/or, not but/and. The possibility that a woman might feel relief, grief, and confusion about abortion, all at the same time, is hard to discuss.’ Perhaps this explains why her own handling of the present occasionally lacks the compassion she brings to her historical analyses. In her Coda, she writes that she is hopeful despite recent abortion rollbacks: ‘Periods of acute repression have not lasted. Like wildfires, moral panics burn out, and times of toleration usually follow.’ What about those lost in the fire? Fissell clearly cares for such individuals — her book opens with a visit to the grave of Eliza Wilson, who died following an abortion in 1848. But I wonder whether the sanitisation produced by scale is politically or personally helpful. 

There is more foundational problem with the use of history here. As Fissell herself acknowledges, the past — though less liable for polarisation — is a hard place to seek ‘stories of actual women who decided to end their pregnancies.’ ‘What did the young woman,’ — an enslaved singer in Ancient Greece told to jump vigorously up and down — ‘feel when that tiny lump of flesh hit the floor, aside from surprise? Relief? Confusion? Competence? We will never know.’ Fissell’s sources are mostly the records of male doctors, judges, confessors. If complex personal accounts are what we lack, we won’t find many in the past. What we will find is strategies, recipes, and silences we can fill with our own, complicated imaginings.

PHILIPPA MONK is tidying her room, again.

Art by Cordelia Wilson