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An ancient entertainer robbed of her livelihood while pregnant; a medieval holy woman performing a ‘miraculous termination'; an abortion provider prosecuted as a witch during the Reformation; a Victorian midwife saving her patients from the workhouse. Women have always sought to end pregnancies, and have long succeeded. This book tells their stories.From enslaved and Indigenous herbal knowledge on early plantations to Planned Parenthood's unlikely alliance with postwar churches, Mary Fissell reveals abortion's long politics, uncovering 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 black and white in Christian morality: it was not a crime in Britain until 1803, nor a religious issue in America until the twentieth century. But those histories of calm have been punctuated by moments of acute repression—as we're seeing today.From France and Scotland to Germany and Italy, abortion controls through the centuries have always emerged 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 limits never endure.

The long history of how restricting access to abortion has been used to curtail women's advancement Attitudes about abortion cycle between long periods of widespread tolerance, to repression, and back again. What accounts for these pendulum swings? From ancient Greece to the modern West, historian of medicine Mary Fissell argues, abortion repression springs up in response to men's anxieties about women's increasing independence. In Pushback, Fissell shows that, across centuries and continents, abortion has always been commonplace, and persecuting women for ending pregnancies has been about controlling their behavior. As Protestantism de-emphasized celibacy, new abortion restrictions policed unmarried women's sex lives. Nineteenth-century men unsettled by first-wave feminism hoped to establish medicine as a male profession, and so advocated for abortion bans to undercut women's new roles as physicians. Fissell presents this history through the hidden stories of women committed to reproductive self-determination: holy women of the early Catholic Church whose ability to end pregnancies was considered miraculous, midwives accused of witchcraft or criminal conspiracy, and everyday women whose pregnancies threatened their livelihoods—and their lives.Pushback is essential reading for understanding the complex history of abortion and making sense of recent crackdowns on reproductive rights.