Erin Maglaque reflects on her own abortions and the history of abortion in early modern Europe, arguing that the abstract language of rights and choice obscures the physical and emotional reality of the experience. She writes that the brutality of the procedure—the fasting, pain, and blood—was surprising, and that the feminist narrative of autonomy did not capture the visceral nature of the event.
The Body's Rebellion Against Abstraction
Maglaque describes how the pain of abortion is particular, not abstract. She recalls lowering her car seat to avoid seeing schoolchildren, pressing her body against a hot radiator, and telling her partner she did not want to forget being pregnant. The experience, she says, had nothing to do with abstract ideas about life or rights; it was about the immediate death of a potential life.
She criticizes the language of life, choice, and rights as disembodying, citing Adrienne Rich's argument that such abstraction isolates women from history and context. There is no pure murder or pure healthcare abortion, only the particularity of each case.
Historical Continuity: Abortion Before and After Legalization
Maglaque draws on Annie Ernaux's writing about her clandestine abortion in 1963 France, noting that legalization does not erase the memory or the pain. She applies this to the post-Roe v. Wade era in the United States, where abortion rights have been eroded in many states, and to restrictions in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, and attempts in France and Italy. The past is not over; the 50 years of Roe were an aberration in millennia of abortion history.
She shares her second abortion, which was less physically painful but emotionally more difficult because she knew what the symptoms meant. The feeling of being pregnant and not wanting to be was profound.
Early Modern Abortion: A Shared, Ordinary Reality
As a historian of early modern Europe, Maglaque explains that between 1500 and 1800, abortion was often seen as a shared problem involving men, women, and communities. Men procured herbs, arranged blood-letting, or beat partners' abdomens. Women called an aborted foetus a creatura or a pezzo di carne (piece of meat). Abortion was ordinary, relying on kitchen garden herbs and whispered instructions.
Legal penalties varied. In the Holy Roman Empire, post-quickening abortion could mean execution by impalement or drowning; early-term abortion might lead to exile. However, prosecution rates were low because abortion was hard to prove. For example, Anna Weilbächin was banished for three months for ingesting laurel berries in 1608.
Catholic Doctrine and Gestational Development
Maglaque notes that the Catholic Church's claim of condemning abortion since the first century is historically inaccurate. For most of its history, the Church believed ensoulment occurred at 40 days for males and 80 days for females. A midwife in Rome in 1634 said she threw aborted foetuses without souls into the latrine. Pope Sixtus V's 1588 bull abolished this distinction, declaring life at conception and mandating excommunication and capital punishment, but it was reversed three years later as unworkable.
Protestant attitudes also hardened, linking abortion and infanticide to illicit female sexuality.
Women's Bodies as Evidence: Forensics and Defiance
Women were often not trusted to know their own bodies. In 1577, Maria da Brescia thought she had eaten bad onions and expelled a foetus she did not know she carried. In 1610, Lucia delivered a stillborn at seven months; midwives testified she had torn the umbilical cord, allowing the infant's breath to escape, and she was convicted of infanticide. She defiantly insisted the child was not born alive.
Maglaque connects this to her own experience of a 72-hour waiting period in North Carolina, where she was not trusted to make a final decision.
18th-Century Embryology and the Sanctity of Foetal Life
In the 18th century, preformationist embryology argued that the embryo was complete from conception. Giovanni Baptista Bianchi's 1741 treatise depicted a 10-week foetus as a tiny human. This merged life and soul, making abortion a double murder—of temporal and eternal life. Francesco Emanuele Cangiamila's Embriologia Sacra (1745) argued that abortion was never permissible, even to save the mother, and mandated postmortem caesarean sections for baptism. This became law in Sicily in 1749.
Maglaque notes that this fundamentalist view resurfaces today, with Cangiamila's work cited on anti-abortion websites.
The Use of History: Against Forgetfulness
Maglaque argues that history can counter the abstraction of abortion debate. The Supreme Court's Dobbs decision relied on a flawed historical narrative, citing a 13th-century treatise without context. She contrasts this with the real stories of Lucia, Lorenzo, and countless others who buried foetuses under thresholds or sought sanctuary of respite for stillborns.
She concludes that abortion is unforgettable. She does not want to forget her own abortion or those of women in the past. The presence of the dead, she says, is preferable to their absence. Anti-abortionists want to use history to forget, but the experience of abortion—whether legal or illegal—remains etched in the body and memory.
