Savin, Sex and Scandal: Rethinking Abortion in Early Modern Anglo-America
George Washington Corner Society for the History of Medicine presents, Savin, Sex and Scandal: Rethinking Abortion in Early Modern Anglo-America.
Abortion only rarely went to court in early-modern England or the American colonies. Before 1803, there was no English criminal statute prohibiting it. Yet the 2022 Dobbs decision declared that abortion had always been perceived as wrong in England and early America. This talk explores a few unusually detailed legal cases as well as medical sources to explore how seventeenth-century people understood ending a pregnancy.
Mary E. Fissell is the Inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, with additional appointments in History and in History of Science and Technology. She is president of the American Association of the History of Medicine and edited the Bulletin of the History of Medicine for 15 years. Her fellowships include the NLM, Folger Shakespeare Library, and Princeton’s Davis Center. Her books include Vernacular Bodies (Oxford, 2004) and Pushback (Seal, 2025), a history of abortion from antiquity to antibiotics.
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