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.

Speaker: Mary E. Fissell is the Inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor of the History of Medicine in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, where she also holds appointments in the Departments of History and History of Science and Technology. She currently serves as president of the AAHM. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the NLM, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Davis Center at Princeton University. Fissell has published and podcasted on topics including early modern reproduction, patient-healer relations; popular books about sex, and the history of early-modern vermin. Her recent Pushback (Seal Books, 2025), explores the history of abortion from antiquity to antibiotics.