The Corner Society "Savin, Sex, and Scandal: Rethinking Abortion in Early Modern Anglo-America"

Mary Fissell,  Inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor, Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

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 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, having edited the Bulletin of the History of Medicine for 15 years. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the NLM, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Davis Center at Princeton University.

 Her scholarly work has focused on the patient's perspective in the history of medicine; gender, sexuality, and the history of the body; popular culture; and books and reading in early modern England and the Atlantic world. Her book Vernacular Bodies (Oxford, 2004) analyzed how everyday ideas about making babies mediated large scale social, political, and religious change. She’s recently published Pushback (Seal Books, 2025), a history of abortion from antiquity to antibiotics. She has published and podcasted on topics including pregnancy determination, popular books about sex, and the history of early-modern vermin.