Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion

For millennia, abortion restrictions have arisen as part of larger waves of backlash against women’s rights, according to this brilliant history from Fissell (Vernacular Bodies), a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Tracing the ebb and flow of abortion restrictions from the ancient world to the present day, Fissell finds that periods of restriction are less frequent than commonly believed (vast swaths of history are eras of “quiet toleration” when most people “look the other way” when it comes to abortion). She also reveals that reasons to restrict abortion vary significantly over time—from the Puritans’ concern that too much sex was going on (and abortions implied an impending unmanageable explosion in population growth) to the colonial-era Caribbean concern that not enough sex was going on (and abortions were hampering population growth). Only very recently has concern about the “unborn” become an excuse for restriction, she determines. But a consistent through line of every major period of restriction, Fissell discovers, is a concurrent generalized pushback against women’s growing personal freedoms, ranging from first-century Roman worries that women “no longer stayed at home but rode around the city in carriages as they pleased,” to antebellum American hand-wringing over “first-wave feminists... giving lectures about sexual health and pleasure.” Elegantly written and bursting with insight, this is a must-read. (Mar.)