The physical reality of my abortion caught me off guard. I had spent so much time defending abortion as an abstract right—a right to privacy, healthcare, and autonomy—that when I actually had one, I was shocked by how brutal it was. Fasting for hours beforehand. Feeling clammy and light-headed, with cold, damp hands in the clinic waiting room. Waves of cramping pain afterward, the blood and vomiting from the anesthesia, days of cramping and bleeding. Soaking through pads. Cold sweats. I thought having an abortion would feel like exercising the hard-won autonomy that generations of feminists before me had fought for. But mostly, it just hurt.
What do you do with the raw fact of pain? With what Annie Ernaux describes, writing about her own abortion before it was legal in France, as an experience that sweeps through the body? I couldn’t easily turn it into a feminist political statement, a slogan, or something I could or wanted to shout. It didn’t feel like exercising bodily autonomy; it didn’t feel like a choice, even though, in a formal and factual way, I did choose to have an abortion. It’s just that the choice seemed like the least important and least interesting part of the whole experience—totally forgettable when faced with the violence and urgency of my body, reeling and rebelling against the sudden shift from being pregnant to not being pregnant. Nor did the sensations of the abortion feel like the making of a story, like raw material for an anecdote that could be condensed and shared on social media, piled up with others to make some kind of grievance. There was no real plot—just feeling.
The pain was specific. It had nothing to do with abstract ideas about life, conception, the conflicting rights of a fetus and a woman, feminism, or the US Supreme Court. I remember lowering the backrest of the car seat all the way because I felt too dizzy to sit up straight, and because it was the middle of the afternoon and I didn’t want to see the crowds of kids streaming out of school. I remember pressing my cramping body against a hot radiator. I remember telling my partner that I didn’t want to forget I had been pregnant. That I wanted to count this one, among what I hoped would be future, wanted pregnancies. I wasn’t thinking about life in the abstract, but about this life, and its immediate and necessary death.
History is good at capturing the specific. So it’s refreshing when the specificity of history meets the disembodied abstraction of abortion talk. The language of life, choice, and rights only deals in absence, in a kind of virtual version of the body. As Adrienne Rich writes, this abstraction isolates women; the abstraction of abortion “debate” cuts women off from history, context, and circumstance. There is no abortion that takes place in the imagined world of either pro- or anti-abortion language. No abortion that is pure murder, no abortion that is pure healthcare. There is only abortion in all its historical particularity. When Ernaux wrote about her clandestine abortion in 1963, she argued that just because abortion was legalized in France doesn’t mean we should forget what it was like before. What happened before isn’t completely over. The sensations and memories of the body don’t end just because something illegal has become legal, or because something legal has become illegal again.
Ernaux’s words take on new meaning after the repeal of Roe v. Wade in the United States in 2022, and the erosion of reproductive rights in Poland, Hungary, and Turkey, as well as attempts to roll back abortion rights in France and Italy. It’s not over: not only because the experience of clandestine abortion is itself unforgettable, but because women are still having clandestine abortions.Abortions happen all over the world. There’s a new urgency to understanding why the past keeps repeating itself, because it turns out the past never really ended the way we thought. The 50 years of Roe v. Wade were the exception, not the rule, in abortion’s long history stretching back thousands of years. Abortion teaches us that history isn’t a steady march toward freedom. History—and abortion—are more painful and more personal than that.
What does it feel like to be pregnant and not want to be? I’ve known that feeling twice. Once, when I was younger and not ready. And once, when I already had a child but felt unready again. Unready for the demands of two. Unready to go through another physical transformation. Unready to feel my body taken over by another person again. The second time was less painful. I knew my body better, figured out I was pregnant earlier, and let the pills dissolve under my tongue. But what it felt like to be pregnant and not want to be was much harder the second time around. I thought I could feel my body wanting to be pregnant. This time, I understood what the morning sickness meant, the slowness that crept through my muscles, the fatigue.
I’m a historian of early modern Europe. European early modernity—roughly between 1500 and 1800—is neither modern nor ancient. It sits uneasily between the strangeness of the medieval past and the familiarity of the late modern era. In early modernity, the difference between being possessed by a demon and being possessed by an unwanted fetus was a matter of degree, not kind. In Italy, an aborted pregnancy was called a disgravidanza (an unpregnancy) or sometimes a parto acerbo (an unripe birth). Judges described abortion using words like corruption, waste, disorder, and ruin. Women’s language was more ordinary. When giving evidence in court, they called an aborted fetus a creatura (a creature); an earlier-stage abortion was a pezzo di carne (a piece of meat). Abortion was shared work, because men needed abortions to happen just as much as women did. Men got herbal mixtures from doctors and pharmacists, arranged for bloodletting (from the “vein of the mother,” located on the foot), or—in truly desperate cases—beat their partners’ backs and stomachs.
There’s so much we don’t know about abortion in the past. It’s likely that most abortions were sought by married couples who didn’t want more children, but these were private and went unrecorded. The trials that made it to court inevitably focused on the most scandalous cases. In the Holy Roman Empire, new legal codes in 1532 introduced extremely harsh penalties for women who committed infanticide and abortion. Both were now capital crimes. If a woman got an abortion after quickening—the moment she felt the fetus move inside her—she would be executed by impalement or drowning. An early-term abortion would be punished by exile.
Thousands of women—and some men—were executed or exiled for infanticide across the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. But abortion was harder to prove, and conviction rates were much lower. Across early modern Germany, very few women were prosecuted for abortion, and those who were faced lenient punishments. For example, Anna Weilbächin, a domestic servant, was banished from Augsburg for three months in 1608 for getting an abortion by eating laurel berries. In Italy, too, abortion was rarely prosecuted as a crime, even when local laws had harsh sentencing rules for women (and men) who had abortions.
Behind even the rare stories of open scandal, there’s a more ordinary history: the quiet purchase of a bitter drink from a pharmacist, the bleeding and the pain, boiling the stained linens. This is one reason why prosecution and conviction rates stayed so low in both Protestant and Catholic Europe: abortion was ordinary, relying on herbs.I found it in kitchen gardens and along roadsides, in instructions whispered between women working together in the fields. And I remember the ordinary moments too. Turning the shower scalding hot after I learned I was pregnant and, in that same instant, deciding what I would do. Afterwards, nauseous from fasting and anesthesia, trying and failing to eat lunch.
Today, the Catholic Church claims it has considered abortion a mortal sin since the first century. That’s not true. For most of the church’s history, Catholic theologians believed that the moral and physical seriousness of abortion grew with the pregnancy. An early pregnancy was easily lost and hadn’t yet been given a soul by God; it was thought that animation happened at 40 days for a male fetus and 80 days for a female. (These were the points when fetuses were believed to take human shape; the female sex was colder and moister, so it took longer to form into a human in the womb.) Before animation, the unformed fetus could be aborted, and the pregnant woman only committed a mild sin. Only at the later stage was it considered human, and destroying it was the same as killing a person.
Most men and women—not just learned theologians and doctors—shared this more nuanced view of abortion. One midwife in Rome calmly reported in 1634 that her usual practice was to “throw aborted fetuses that do not have a soul in the latrine, and I do not baptize them because they are not alive.”
This way of thinking was sharply condemned by Pope Sixtus V in his 1588 decree on abortion, the first the Catholic Church had ever issued. It was part of Sixtus’s reform campaign against sexual immorality; he had already issued harsh laws against adultery and incest in 1586 and 1587. In his abortion decree, he abolished the distinction between the pre-animate and post-animate fetus and declared that life began at conception. All abortions were murder. Women who had abortions, and men who helped them, would be automatically excommunicated from the church and could face the death penalty. Women could no longer privately confess their abortions to their parish priest and receive penance; now, only the pope himself could forgive them.
As a result, after Sixtus V’s decree on abortion, many women chose to live excommunicated, meaning they could no longer receive the sacraments, including communion. Parish priests and bishops found the decree so impossible to enforce and so out of step with the social need for abortion and privacy that it was reversed three years later by a new pope. The church’s understanding of abortion once again closely followed gestational development.
In Protestant Europe, attitudes toward abortion also hardened during the early modern period. Luther had emphasized the importance of the family as the center of devotional life. For reformers, marriage was sacred—even clergy could now marry. But all forms of sexuality outside marriage were harshly punished; abortion and infanticide became the ultimate symbols of illicit, wayward female sexuality, crimes closely linked in the imagination with single women.
Because the significance of abortion—and the severity of the consequences—grew with the pregnancy, women had to be trusted to figure out the gestational age of the fetus, to tell the difference between indigestion and early fetal movement, or between swelling and the heaviness of pregnancy. Maria da Brescia, a single servant woman in Bologna accused of abortion in 1577, thought she had eaten some bad onions and went to bed with gas pains. When she got up to use the toilet, she explained to the judge: “I expelled that creature on the floor, dead, it did not cry… I had never been pregnant and I did not know what I had in my body. I thought I had a bubble in my body.”
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Pope Sixtus V. Photograph: SuperStock/Alamy
When Agatha Rüefflin was accused of killing her newborn infant in Augsburg in 1610, she—anHer physician told the court that she had been so swollen and feverish from dropsy that she didn’t even realize she had given birth. Women weren’t trusted to know their own bodies or minds, and the same often holds true today. When I sought my second abortion, I was living in North Carolina, which was a relatively safe place for abortion in the South. I had to wait 72 hours before I could get the medication, just in case I changed my mind.
In early modern times, it was hard to tell the difference between a miscarriage, a stillbirth, and infanticide. Secular courts required proof that a woman had intentionally ended her pregnancy or killed the baby shortly after birth. Midwives, hired by courts in Italy and Germany as forensic experts, examined the bodies of the mother and fetus. They were given the nearly impossible task of gathering evidence of intent. In 1610, a young woman named Lucia from outside Bologna gave birth to a stillborn baby at seven months. Two midwives examined her as part of the court case and reviewed witness statements. The fetus was female, fully formed with hair and fingernails, and was still warm when wrapped in Lucia’s shirt. The midwives told the court that Lucia hadn’t tied the umbilical cord in a knot but had torn it. This, they said, let the baby’s breath escape its body, puff by puff, and she was found guilty of infanticide—of letting a baby born alive die. Lucia was defiant. “It was not born alive,” she said, “and I will never be able to say why it wasn’t.”
Lucia’s defiance reveals how invasive the court was—how her flesh and her stillborn child’s were turned into forensic evidence, and how much strength it took to stand up to that. I also hear in Lucia’s words an experience that’s hard to put into words. Her baby’s body couldn’t be interpreted. It wasn’t a sign of human wrongdoing, but of God’s unknowable will.
When Ernaux writes about her own abortion as “an experience that sweeps through the body,” I think this is partly what she means: a feeling so deeply rooted in the body that it’s hard to turn into words. In the days before my second termination, I agonized over the practicalities of having or not having a second child. The abortion came as a relief. Nothing to interpret. No evidence to weigh, no decision to make. We’re constantly asked to turn abortion into an argument. But the physical reality of it—the blood and tissue, cramping and sweat—defies interpretation. It demands instead that we pay attention to its wordless sweep through the body.
Discoveries about the nature of the embryo in the 18th century changed ideas about fetal life and abortion. Medical writers began to revise the Aristotelian view that a fetus gained a soul at 40 or 80 days. Instead, they argued that the embryo existed in a complete and perfect form from the moment of conception. Giovanni Baptista Bianchi’s treatise on human generation, published in Turin in 1741, was an influential statement of this new science of embryology. The images in the book emphasized the preformationist argument that even at 10 weeks’ gestation—previously seen as the cusp of ensoulment—a fetus was a tiny, complete human. Life and soul, once seen as separate moments of conception and animation, were now merged.
The development of embryology was both proof and reason for the Church’s growing anxiety about infant life and death. If a fetus had a soul from the moment of conception, then its mortal soul could be in danger not only after birth but during pregnancy. If a fetus died—through miscarriage or abortion—and hadn’t been baptized, its soul would burn in purgatory. This became unacceptable for some church theologians in the 18th century.By the 18th century, mothers who had abortions were seen as guilty of not just one murder but two—”both the temporal and eternal life of their children,” as one parish priest warned. “For this, these children will cry out for all eternity … for revenge.”
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Giovanni Baptista Bianchi’s stages of foetal development. Photograph: Wellcome Collection
Eighteenth-century midwifery manuals described dozens of extreme situations where midwives had to perform a hasty baptism, giving precise instructions for each. François Mauriceau invented a special pump to spray holy water onto part of the child’s body during labour. In 1733, theologians at the Sorbonne debated this practice and reluctantly decided that baptism by water-jet during birth was acceptable.
Ordinary men and women seemed equally concerned about the supernatural fate of their foetuses. When a child was stillborn, it was common in northern Italy and parts of France to take the body to a special religious shrine, called a sanctuary of respite, known for working miracles. The child might be resurrected, even for a moment, just long enough to be baptised. In 1643, when a woman named Caterina gave birth to a stillborn son, the child’s father, Lorenzo, heard a few days later about one such shrine a few miles away. He dug up the child’s coffin and brought it there. Women placed the little body before the altar and “touched the wrists, the nose, and the head of those little corpses and said they showed signs of a miracle, so they could be baptised. Beating their wrists and heads, they said to each other: feel here, there is a pulse beating.”
Archaeologists who have excavated these shrines have found hundreds of infant corpses, some from miscarriages or abortions as early as four months into pregnancy, brought there to be briefly reanimated for baptism. Theologians were sceptical and tried to stop the practice. They argued that the women working at the altars would warm the little bodies by candlelight until they looked flushed, using tricks of air and temperature to make it seem as if the corpse blew a feather placed on its lips. What did Lorenzo see there, in the dim candlelight of an altar? What did he want to see? Archaeologists discovered that the infants, now part of the community of the faithful, were buried in neat rows under the church porch, their hands carefully folded in prayer.
The souls of unbaptised, aborted, and miscarried foetuses lingered and haunted their parents. Because unbaptised foetuses couldn’t be buried in a cemetery, people buried them in fields, under the thresholds of their houses, or in the cellar. Midwives stuffed the tiny remains into cracks in church walls. They couldn’t move on from the community of the living, and were said to join executed people and those who died by suicide in an army of the undead roaming the countryside.
In 1745, the Sicilian priest Francesco Emanuele Cangiamila published a treatise that combined these medical and theological ideas about foetal development. Embriologia Sacra was a hugely influential book, translated into many languages and published in many editions. It was also radical on the matter of embryonic life. Abortion could never be allowed, even to save the mother’s life. “This is very hard, I admit,” Cangiamila wrote, but, claiming to quote the Holy Spirit, he told pregnant women: “Do not consider yourself in your infirmity, but pray to the Lord, and He will heal you.”
If, as Cangiamila argued, life began at conception, then even the inside of a woman’s body should fall under the church’s authority. “The zeal ofThe church’s ministers,” he wrote at the start of the book, “should have boundless zeal.” Baptism was to be given to every fetus, even those whose mothers had died. Cangiamila argued that postmortem cesarean sections should be performed on all dead pregnant women—even those whose pregnancy was only suspected, not confirmed—so the fetus could be baptized. These arguments became law. In 1749, postmortem cesarean sections became mandatory in Sicily, and hundreds were carried out.
The postmortem cesarean section might seem like a relic from a darker, more barbaric time. But as the fundamentalist belief that life begins at conception becomes embedded in U.S. law, that past is resurfacing. When I looked into editions of Cangiamila’s Embriologia Sacra, I found a translation on a fundamentalist anti-abortion website that collects historical sources to strengthen the case for banning all forms of pregnancy termination.
In her book about experiencing breast cancer and its treatment, poet and writer Anne Boyer reflected: “Sometimes I envy the horrible circumstances of the past, because at least they are differently horrible and differently degraded than our own era’s.”
There is much that was differently degraded about abortion’s past, but is there anything to envy? What’s the use of history when discussing abortion? If abortion is a right today, it’s a fragile one: dependent on judges’ whims, a fundamentalist history, and a property-based view of the body that hides everything real and radical about gestation. Maybe we can learn something from a time when pregnancy was possession—not of the woman, but by another. In early modern times, abortion wasn’t defended as a right but as a fact of life. It involved men, who are often missing from our own abortion stories, because an unwanted pregnancy was a problem for everyone: the mother, the father, the parish priest, the midwife, the community.
The image of the coat hanger has come to represent all of abortion’s past: a bloody story in a backstreet clinic, on a dirty table, a secret exchange of abortion for harm or even death. But there’s more to abortion’s past than that chapter. Our signs might show a dripping red coat hanger with the words “Never again,” but the truth is, while the coat hanger has fallen out of use, the past has returned. The longer history of abortion can teach us about the cycles of condemnation and redemption, and about the 18th-century roots of the claim that life begins at conception. Those cycles also include moves toward freedom and autonomy, like in Ireland, where abortion was legalized in 2018.
In the U.S., history was the main battleground where abortion rights were lost. In 2022, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and ruled that the Constitution does not grant a right to abortion. The majority argued that since the Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention abortion, the right to one would need to be protected by the 14th Amendment, which guarantees rights not listed in the Constitution if those rights are “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.” The past 50 years of Roe, it turns out, are not “settled law”—just shallow roots, easily pulled up. The Christian fundamentalists controlling the court have crafted their own deep history of abortion in the U.S. In his review of the common-law origins of early American abortion law, Justice Samuel Alito started with a 13th-century English legal treatise: “If one strikes a pregnant woman or gives her poison to cause an abortion, if the fetus is already formed or qIf it happens quickly—especially if it’s sped up—he commits murder. But the same text also says that if you find a whale washed up on the beach, you should send the head to the king and the tail to the queen.
The court argues that when the 14th Amendment was written, its creators would not have seen abortion as a right, but as a crime. The majority opinion relies on historical research that historians have thoroughly discredited—work that misreads medieval and early modern cases of abortion and shows a complete lack of understanding of the broader context. The majority’s appeal to history is shocking, partly because the history itself is shockingly bad, as all originalist histories must be. They invent an unreal past where texts are perfectly clear and written in a social vacuum. Context can’t matter to fundamentalist histories of abortion, because context undermines their whole premise. But the court’s history of abortion is also astonishing for the moral weight it gives to that history. Can any history really bear that burden?
‘Thank the Lord, I have been relieved’: the truth about the history of abortion in America
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Alito and the rest of the majority don’t mention stories like the ones I’ve gathered here. Stories about Lucia, who cut the umbilical cord of the baby she delivered all by herself. About Lorenzo, who brought his infant—buried for five days—to a candlelit altar, while the women of the church said, “Feel here.” They can’t mention the thousands of women in the past who used herbs and flowers to bring on bleeding. They can’t mention the whispered confessions of men and women who told their priests about abortions in the springtime, or the penance whispered back to them.
After my partner and I got home from my abortion, I told him I didn’t want to forget. I told him I didn’t want to forget that I had been pregnant. But I think what I really meant was: I don’t want to forget this beginning of a life, and its end. That it existed in its own undefined and immediate way. I didn’t bury my aborted fetus under the doorstep of my house, but it haunts me all the same. This is something anti-abortionists will never understand. It’s comforting to be haunted. The presence of the dead is better than their absence. Or at least, it’s better to be haunted than to forget.
Anti-abortionists find the idea of life and death coexisting inside a woman’s body so unbearable that they want to erase the memory of abortion. They want to use history to forget. I don’t want to forget my abortion; I don’t want to forget theirs. The experience of abortion—whatever your personal feelings about it, whatever the decision or the circumstances—is unforgettable. All the children buried under the doorstep, in the fields, in the gutters; all those lined up under the church porch, buried with their hands folded together. As if in prayer.
Adapted from Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, published by Jonathan Cape. Listen to our podcasts here and sign up for the long read weekly email here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about how views on abortion have shifted over time based on the phrase Its comforting to be haunted
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does Its comforting to be haunted mean in this context
It means that its actually healthy to remember and talk about the difficult painful history of abortionthe illegal procedures the deaths the stigma Being haunted by that past keeps us from pretending it was simple or easy and it reminds us why protecting safe legal access is important
2 Have people always agreed about abortion
No In early America abortion before quickening was widely accepted and legal It wasnt until the late 1800s that doctors pushed to criminalize it mostly to take control of medical practice away from midwives
3 Was abortion always illegal before Roe v Wade
Not exactly It was legal in many states during the 1800s By 1900 it was banned in most states but women still had abortionsoften in secret dangerous ways Roe v Wade in 1973 made it legal nationwide again
4 Why did views on abortion get stricter in the 1800s
Mainly because the new American Medical Association wanted to push out midwives and female healers They also worried about the declining birth rate among white Protestant nativeborn women compared to immigrants
5 What was the biggest change after Roe v Wade
The biggest shift was that abortion became safe and legal which saved thousands of womens lives But it also created a strong political opposition that didnt exist before leading to the current prolife vs prochoice divide
IntermediateLevel Questions
6 How did the backalley abortion change public opinion
Stories of women dying or being permanently injured from illegal unsafe abortions created a lot of sympathy These haunting stories helped build the case for legalization because people realized banning abortion didnt stop itit just made it deadly
7 Why do some people say the prolife movement is actually newer than people think
Because for most of American history abortion wasnt a major political issue
