Teaching Reproductive Justice in the Premodern Classroom
by Valerie Traub
I have taught the history of sexuality in my early modern literature courses since the late 1980s. My goal has always been to expose students to different forms of erotic desire and sexual pleasure, for all genders and identifications. But with the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision, I’m rethinking the syllabus for my “Renaissance Sex” course. What follows are some pedagogical strategies that could be used to augment a focus on pleasure with attention to possible unwanted consequences, including pregnancy and the need to make difficult decisions around it. My aim is to provide students with various conceptual rubrics for engaging with two of the four principles of reproductive justice as described by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice: the right to personal bodily autonomy and the right to not have children (the other, equally important two being the right to have children and to parent in safety).
When I read the Dobbs decision, I was struck by the centrality of history in the majority opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito. Again and again, he opines that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” Drawing primarily on retired law professor Joseph Dellapenna’s 2006 Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, Alito says that “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”
Others have critiqued Alito’s cherry-picking of the evidence, but his misuse of history goes far beyond that. This is a case of willful ignorance — not only of women’s history and the unjust and coercive conditions in which unwanted pregnancy can occur, but also of the history of health care and midwifery. It is as though the past forty years of historical scholarship on gender, sexuality, and medicine never happened. My pedagogical suggestions draw on these disciplines, as well as on literary critics’ fidelity to what texts say and, as importantly, to the contexts in which they said it.
Given the emphasis on history in the Dobbs decision, my first suggested assignment allows students to become judges of what counts as history through encounters with primary source materials and competing contemporary interpretations of them. For readings, I would assign students the Dobbs decision’s early modern evidence, consisting of a single colonial Maryland case of 1652 (Proprietary v. Mitchell); relevant citations from Dellapenna’s book; excerpts from Carla Spivak’s critique of Dellapenna’s work and her analysis of the early modern English cultural context; a recent op-ed about a 1792 Virginia case in which charges were not brought against a woman who self-induced an abortion in the second trimester; and parts of the 2021 amicus brief by the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH), which summarizes changes in American legal practice to show that “American history and tradition” largely support Roe’s “holding that women have a constitutional right to decide for themselves whether to choose to terminate a pregnancy.” Based on these materials, I ask students to discuss what “history” means in this context. Which history, which historians, and whose history is being used to define our national “history and tradition”?
Pursuing this question, one might also assign relevant quotations from the legal writings of Matthew Hale and Edward Coke, two early modern jurists whose stature as legal authority goes unquestioned by the Supreme Court. I ask students to consider these jurists’ other opinions, which include the belief that women are the property of men and that women commit sodomy primarily by having sex with baboons. What makes these men authorities and what image of the body politic do they represent and uphold?
Similar questions about the dubious nature of the majority’s historical reasoning are raised by their treatment of religion. Informing students that the protection of freedom of religion derives from early modern debates about the role of individual conscience, we might discuss recent lawsuits filed by clergy in Florida and Indiana that these state’s restrictive abortion laws violate this constitutional principle. Within Christianity, there are many views regarding when “spiritually significant” life begins and how to balance the life of a pregnant person and a fetus. Jewish law does not ban abortion and does not recognize an unborn fetus as a full legal person. There are no explicit prohibitions against abortion in Islamic law, although scholars debate the timing of fetal “ensoulment” (Asifa Quraishi-Landes; PBS Newshour segment). Legal arguments grounded in religious liberty offer one opportunity for pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates to meet on common ground.
Having introduced the need to scrutinize contending “histories,” the course would move from the realm of jurisprudence to center pregnant people’s bodily experiences. (I use the term “women” when it is reflective of the source text’s language, but I flag here that not all pregnant people are women and that not all women can become pregnant.) We begin with the premodern notion of quickening (the moment fetal movement is first felt, generally between 17 and 23 weeks) to explore the temporality of decision making. As the AHA/OAH amicus brief notes, pregnancy termination prior to quickening was of little concern to either English or American law before the 1820s. We would discuss the paradox raised by this privileging of experience: given that only the pregnant person knew if quickening had occurred, this criterion actually fostered their reproductive control. We’d discuss, as well, how self-induced abortion by married women in the premodern period was considered a private concern, raising questions about who was afforded something like the “right to privacy” and in what contexts.
I then would turn to the herbs and potions used to “regulate” menstruation described in a range of early modern household texts. One opportunity to discuss the pervasiveness of such knowledge is offered by Ben Jonson’s 1609 play Epicoene. When the Ladies Collegiates invite Epicoene to join their society and share strategies for “managing” their husbands, Epicoene asks, “And have you those excellent receipts [recipes], madam, to keep yourselves from bearing of children?” (4.4.513). The Collegiate Haughty responds, “Oh yes. . . . How should we maintain our youth and beauty else? Many births of a woman make her old, as many crops make the earth barren” (54–6). Rather than focus solely on Jonson’s misogynist satire, students can be directed to research early modern household recipes for preventing conception.
Over time, women’s herbal knowledge was actively suppressed as male doctors wrested obstetrics and gynecology away from midwives, which set the stage for the nineteenth-century criminalization of abortion. Introducing these two historical shifts provides an opportunity to discuss the lack of concern for healthcare in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion and the dissent’s attempt to foreground the effects of health decisions on women’s lives. This context sparks consideration of the disparate circumstances, including poverty, domestic violence, and enforced servitude, in which women make difficult reproductive decisions. As the English infanticide statute of 1624 makes clear, “[f]rom the beginning, concerns about abortion were a part of the broader concern with illicit sex” (Spivack). When infanticide was criminalized in England in 1624, it was the sexual conduct of impoverished, unmarried women, rather than the death of the infant, that was the focus of prosecution. Pairing a discussion of contemporary disparities in access to care and resources with early modern texts that reveal how material conditions, such as poverty and lack of kin, negatively impacted pregnant women allows students to discuss the protections provided by high social status, then as now.
Students may already be aware that, given the way in which racial and class oppression intersect in the contemporary US, the risks of enforced pregnancy will fall disproportionately on Black and Brown women. They may not be aware that BIPOC women engaged in their own forms of reproductive planning and reproductive resistance during the early modern period. Reading passages from early modern European travel narratives and naturalist accounts that report the use of herbs by Indigenous and enslaved African women to control their fertility, as well as to terminate pregnancies to prevent enforced servitude, connects students to these histories. Maria Sibylla Merian, the Dutch naturalist who observed enslaved and Indigenous women in seventeenth-century Surinam, recorded that the “Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds [of peacock flower] to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves.” Describing the cruelty of the Spaniards in Hispaniola, John Ogilby’s America (1671) reminds the reader that “Peter Martyr relates, That the Men wearied with working in the Mines, kill’d themselves, despairing of ever being releas’d from their Slavery; and Women with Child destroy’d the Infants in their Wombs, that they might not bear Slaves for the Spaniards.”
One could link these women’s embodied resistance to the trial of Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter to prevent her enslavement in 1856, and Toni Morrison’s fictionalization of Garner’s story in Beloved. This would provide an opportunity for early modernists to connect such acts of reproductive resistance to the advent of the 13th and 14th amendments, and to the novel legal strategies now emerging to contest the Dobbs decision by means of their protections. (For an analysis of the role of these amendments in the fight for reproductive justice, see Michele Goodwin and Lisa A. Crooms-Robinson.)
Given the ubiquity of the sexual double standard, early modern imaginative literature provides ample prompts for discussing reproductive justice within the context of dominant male attitudes toward female bodies. A particularly difficult but productive example is Shakespeare’s 1594 narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Given the challenge of explaining to students Lucrece’s reasoning as she prepares to commit suicide, it is easy to overlook the fact that she names pregnancy as one of the consequences of her rape. When she prepares to divulge Tarquin’s assault to her husband, so intense is her shame, and so strong is her suicidal intention, that she imagines that she has already conceived an illegitimate offspring. In voicing her commitment to kill herself, she indicates that she also is preparing to kill her child: “This bastard graff shall never come to growth.” Although Lucrece’s collusion with patriarchal ideals of chastity may seem distant from the concerns of today’s women and girls, her rejection of the prospect of carrying her rapist’s progeny to term brings her predicament nearer to theirs.
If Lucrece welcomes infanticide as a solution to her grief and shame, other texts project onto women preemptive guilt. The premodern reception of the Ovidian tale of Callisto, who is raped by Jove after he assumed the shape of Diana, provides one powerful example. In the fourteenth-century Ovide Moralisé, Callisto’s shame, pregnancy, birth of a son, and transformation into a constellation are followed by moralistic commentary about “the many women who spend much of their lives in debauchery”; and then the text continues:
Even though it is against nature, against law, and against mercy, in order to better conceal their transgressions, some women use potions . . . to make the semen in their bodies perish, or they smother or kill it at birth. Oh God, what great treachery and awful cruelty it is when those who are without guilt are condemned by their own mothers and delivered into eternal death, often before they are even born. (Translation by Peggy McCracken, cited with permission)
The link between Callisto, who carries her pregnancy to term, and those “whores” who abort or kill their infants, is never revealed. This lacuna in patriarchal logic raises the issue of how the responsibility and consequences for unwanted pregnancy fall not on rapists, but on survivors. Exploring this logic might enable students to connect the centuries-long history of antifeminism to the Supreme Court’s cloaking of its antifeminism as impartial judicial reasoning, including Alito’s claim that “a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification and is thus not subject to the ‘heightened scrutiny’ that applies to such classifications.”
It is because of such antifeminism that we have — and need — feminism. I thus end with the anonymous sixteenth-century Scots ballad “Mary Hamilton” (Child ballad 173, version B), which narrates the tale of an attendant to the Queen of Scots who becomes pregnant by the Stuart King. Mary relates that she is being summoned to be executed because, having secretly given birth, she put her infant son in a small boat and pushed him out to sea. In one version, the king, seeing Mary enter the town for her execution, invites her to dine with him. She retorts, in a stunning rebuke to her monarch and the double standard: “Hold your tongue, my sovereign liege / And let your folly be; / An ye had a mind to save my life, / Ye should na shamed me here.”
This ballad offers another opportunity to discuss the sexual double standard and the politics of accountability. But it offers something more. Speaking back to those in power is also part of our “histories and traditions.” Knowing about such acts of resistance, real and imagined, could provide students with support and inspiration for the long struggle ahead as they seek to (re)gain control over their reproductive lives.
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Peggy McCracken, Cecilia Morales, and Hannah Bredar for their suggestions of relevant texts, as well as to the participants on the ACMRS roundtable, Kim Hall, Ariane Balizet, Maeve Callan, and Lydia Harris, whose thought-provoking presentations sparked important thinking. Special thanks to Emily Coccia, who is an editing genius, and Doug Anderson for sharing his photography expertise.
You can access a bibliography from the Rights Revoked roundtable here, and you can view the entire recording of the Rights Revoked ACMRS Roundtable here.
Valerie Traub is the Adrienne Rich Distinguished University Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015), The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002), and Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992, reissued 2014). Both Thinking Sex and The Renaissance of Lesbianism won the Best Book award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. In addition, she has edited several collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (2016), which received the Ronald H. Bainton Prize for Best Reference Work in 2016. Her latest co-edited collection is Ovidian Transversions: Iphis and Ianthe, 1350–1650. She is currently finishing Mapping Normality in the Early Modern West, which examines how gender, race, and sexuality in cartographic and anatomical illustration comprise a prehistory of the concept of the normal.
