Reproducing Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe

Reproducing Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe Nina Kushner (bio) John Christopoulos. Abortion in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 368 pp. ISBN 9780674248090 (cl). Julie Hardwick. Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660–1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 294 pp. ISBN: 9780190945183 (cl). Karen Harvey. The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 224 pp. ISBN: 9780198734888 (cl). On Friday, June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court issued its long-awaited ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, in which it upheld the constitutionality of a Mississippi law prohibiting abortion after the fifteenth week of pregnancy. In doing so, the Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, which recognized abortion as a constitutional right under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In drafting the opinion for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito rested several legal arguments on his reading of history. He argued that abortion had been criminalized in England since the thirteenth century and, more critically, that abortion and a right to it were neither "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition" nor "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" and hence do not qualify for protection under the due process clause.1 Historians of abortion in the United States vigorously refuted these statements.2 The Dobbs decision has since led to the limitation and even denial of access to abortion for pregnant people in numerous US states, making clear that the history of abortion matters beyond its rich and evolving historiography: it has real-world implications. For many, the ruling is a part of longer histories of the struggle over bodily autonomy and of state discipline over female sexuality more generally. The works reviewed in this essay show the complexity of these histories. While each explores numerous topics, they coalesce around two major themes, one historical and the other historiographic. The historical theme concerns how elite efforts to understand and control female fertility have been tempered by the on-the-ground realities of pregnancy. The historiographical theme is a necessary corollary, a study of how historians use and balance prescriptive and descriptive sources. If these works make any argument collectively, it is that people in sixteenth- through eighteenth-century England, France, and Italy—from those in positions of power in End Page 152 the church and state to poor people living in cities and the countryside—varied widely in their attitudes toward and understandings of reproduction and its control. In Abortion in Early Modern Italy, John Christopoulos tackles the present-day implications of his research directly, urging us to "resist representations that distort history to further self-interest, legitimize authority, and create a desired past" (257). He finds that the peoples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, despite living in and around the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church, evinced a profound ambivalence toward abortion. He explores that ambivalence through a study of the major frameworks that defined the practice in this period: medicine, the church, and the law. Christopoulos deftly moves back and forth between examining ideas and regulations on abortion on the one hand, and, on the other, analyzing how these precepts were understood and experienced by those whose job it was to implement them (judges or local priests, for example), by those seeking or aiding in abortions, and by the women who had abortions. Christopoulos has several main arguments: abortion was widely practiced and tolerated. All kinds of women sought abortions for many different reasons. Many tolerated the practice even as civic and religious authorities were increasingly uncomfortable with it, and legislation reflected that discomfort. Abortion was a sin (the severity of which varied), and in some jurisdictions, it was a crime. But, authorities did not expect or even desire full compliance with the law. Toleration thus encompassed a range of judgments about the practice of abortion, even as some categorized it as homicide. Some authorities thought abortion was a necessary evil preventing even greater ones like infanticide, social disorder, and scandal. Attitudes toward individuals procuring or having abortions were shaped by an additional set of factors...