Thread by @melkatrey

I taught a class on reproductive bodies at Princeton this semester, a course that explored ideas about conception and attempts to regulate who could provide care during labor from antiquity to the Enlightenment.

A thread on historical precedents and legal opinions: 1/16

My students were brilliant, but not a single person who identified as male took the course. Not really surprising, but I’m reminded again after reading Alito’s egregiously ahistorical (and abhorrent) opinion that while many women want to learn this history, men *need* to. 2/16

Historians have been doing this work for years, of course. If you’re curious to read more, you could check out @nursingclio, which was founded in part because of its editor’s desire to make reproductive medical history available to a public readership. 3/16

And there are countless peer-reviewed articles written on the subject, like those linked to here:

4/16

https://twitter.com/JournWomensHist/status/1521650004032638976

Most of this scholarship is very U.S. centered, and based in analysis of legal codes and political systems. Which makes sense. But in my course, we talked about reproduction well before Roe, and outside the U.S. My students kept waiting for us to get to the abortion week. 5/16

But we never did, because neither the Catholic Church nor “traditional” medical practitioners (whom I assume Alito believes he’s aligned with) felt any compunction to regulate abortion before “quickening” (around 16-20 weeks). 6/16

Don’t believe me? You can read the receipts in this very smart thread: 7/16

https://twitter.com/earlymodjustice/status/1521665224331436033

The fact is, abortion just doesn’t appear very often in premodern legal discourse. Far more common in early modern legal codes (like Poor Laws) are draconian measures against single mothers & bastards—the very things that made legalized abortion & contraception so important. 8/16

The reasons are pretty common sense: surgical abortion wasn’t really a thing in the premodern world. Unwanted pregnancies couldn’t be terminated easily. Infanticide appears quite a lot in premodern legal codes for this reason. 9/16

But ok, you say, that proves that killing an infant was *always* wrong and a crime! And if so, there is historical precedent for overturning Roe!

Not exactly. There were, in fact, occasions in which premodern medical providers had to think about the value of fetal life. 10/16

And what is striking, when you look at premodern medical recipes or instructions for caring for parturient people, is that in these circumstances practitioners always prioritized the life of the mother over the potential life of a fetus. 11/16

Think about it: infant mortality rates were sky high in the “good old days” that Alito cites as precedent for his opinion. There were no ultrasounds. No way to save a baby’s life in utero. If a fetus couldn’t be delivered because of malpresentation, it was going to die. 12/16

TW: fetal death & extraction

The choice would be to cut the fetus from its mother’s body (which would kill the mother) or frantically try to deliver the deceased fetus to save the mother’s life, which might include dismembering the fetus. 13/16

And literally no one—NO ONE—would have privileged the life of a fragile infant over that of the mother, who would leave behind other children who needed care.

I wrote about that historical reality here: 14/16

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…

Nothing about “tradition” dictates the erasure of the protections afforded by Roe. The common law precedent Alito cites is not a precedent at all. In fact, the terms of 17th c abortion law (legal until quickening) would support Roe. 15/16

Moreover, history shows us many, many occasions when church authorities recognized a mother’s life and personhood as inherently more worthy of protection than that of an unborn fetus. 16/16