Context Matters: Understanding Why Medieval Legislators Chose to Regulate Women's Pregnant Bodies

The article was inspired by Justice Alito's selective and often misleading use of the medieval history of abortion law to justify the overturning of Roe v. Wade . Hoping to offer a corrective view of the larger conversation about abortion during the premodern era, this article hopes to drive home a number of points. First, modern authorities need to acknowledge that the word “abortion” ( aborsus ) meant something different then than it does now. Second, at its origins, abortion was conceived as a crime against husbands, and thus it falls into a larger body of misogynous law designed to protect men and their heirs from women who exploited their reproductive potential to trick men out of their rightful inheritance. And third, medieval laws against those who provided abortions labeled them as witches or poisoners. Medieval laws about abortion are thus intertwined with fears of the devil and of the woman's body as poison.