Sexuality, reproduction, contraception, and abortion: a review of recent literature.

Abstract

Sexuality, Reproduction, Contraception, and Abortion: A Review of Recent Literature John M. Riddle. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. χ + 245 pp.; ISBN 0-674-16875-5 (d); 0-67416876-3 (pb). Janet Farrell Brodie. Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America . Ithaca: CorneU University Press, 1994. xvüi + 373 pp.; ISBN 0-80142849 -1 (cl). Eva R. Rubin. The Abortion Controversy: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. xxiv + 312 pp.; ISBN 0-313-28476-8 (cl). David J. Garrow. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of "Roe v. Wade". New York: Macmillan, 1994. viii + 981 pp.; ISBN 0-02-542755-5 (d). Patrida G. Miner. The Worst of Times. New York: HarperCoUins, 1993. viU + 328 pp.; ISBN 0-06-019034-5 (cl). Norma McCorvey, with Andy Meisler. I Am Roe: My Life, "Roe V. Wade. " and Freedom of Choice. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. viii + 216 pp. ISBN 0-06-017010-7 (d). James C. Mohr As recently as thirty years ago, topics such as sexuatity reproduction, contraception, and abortion hardly existed as fields of historical inquiry. Although demographers had begun to apply statistical analyses to impersonal data, the sodal history and human behavior behind those numbers had not yet been explored. Sodal historians in 1965 would stiU have had only two serious books to consult on the subject of fertility regulation in the past: Norman E. Himes' Medical History of Contraception and Frederick J. Taussig's Abortion, Spontaneous and Induced: Medical and Social Aspects, both of which had been written from primarily medical perspectives and both of which had been standing virtually alone since their nearly simultaneous publication almost thirty years before that in 1936. Since then, of course, we have seen an explosion of historical studies about sexuatity, reproduction, contraception, and abortion. The result has profoundly altered our discipline, and we now have paperbacks to assign in dass that a number of bookstores might have refused to stock thirty years ago. In reviewing half a dozen of the latest contributions to these increasingly visible topics, however, it is useful to remember not only how © 1996 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. 8 No. ι (Spring) 1996 Review Essay James C. Mohr 173 far the profession has come, but also how fast. With many of these topics, historians are still experiendng the thriUs of discovery and advancing what amount to almost preliminary hypotheses, some of which wiU undoubtedly look green and adolescent to those who follow us in the next century. Consequently, even though the temptation is to treat this kind of sodal history as a revolution already wrought, I think we should approach these works as tentative and exploratory; we need to be sharply analytical, even skeptical, and we need to pay critical attention to the ways in which they draw upon and might be likely to affect women's history. Chtronologically the first of the six books under scrutiny here is John M. Riddle's Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance . Riddle is a scholar of classical antiquity, who has written extensively on ancient Greek, Roman, and Middle Eastern medical, botanical, and pharmaceutical texts. His most far-reaching discovery in those texts, which is repeated here, has never received the publidty it deserves: the Hippocratic Oath, it turns out, did not actually pledge physicians against "giv[ing] a woman an abortive remedy" of any kind or "givpng] a woman means to procure an abortion" (the two most widely accepted modern translations). Instead, the original oath specifically proscribed only abortif acient pessaries (similar to modern vaginal or uterine suppositories) and did so in the context of poison control. By impUcation, the oath could be read as neutral, even permissive, toward other sorts of abortifacient techniques , which were well known and widely practiced in the time of Hippocrates. This is no trivial quibble in view of the fact that many American medical school graduates have ritualistically intoned the Hippocratic Oath for two centuries, beUeving that the Oath (whether they chose to follow it or not) contained a blanket opposition to abortion in general. It does not. If anyone ever asks you why...