Abortion and Sexuality

             Women in antiquity not only had limited legal status, no political voice, but were also condemned to a terrible sex life. While their husbands were away fighting wars, they were supposed to be chaste and faithful, eagerly waiting the day when their husbands would return. However, some women refused to wait and instead succumbed to sexual desires and when they did, the consequences were monumental. While I was reading Kapparis’s “Abortion in the Ancient World”, a passage really struck me and even though this was written in a 1913 novel about a couple in a small town in Greece, the evidence that is presented in both his book and from primary sources suggests that women faced similar circumstances when their “dirty” deeds were discovered.

          One evening when he returned home somewhat earlier than usual he caught sight of an old woman leaving the house by the front door. She was tall, with a black wimple tied in a knot beneath her large chin. At the sight of him in the distance, she could not suppress a tiny movement that betrayed a certain fright. Going hastily around the first corner, she disappeared. Something told him that this curious visit portended some indefinable evil for his household. Quickening his pace, he flew up the steps three at a time, the stairway creaking behind him…

       A little later that same evening, when they gathered around the dinner table with their customary bickering and began to eat, Stylianoula suddenly let out a scream with the first mouthful she took.
       ‘Oooch! Oh mama! mama!’
        A terrible pain was knifing through her stomach and abdomen, together with a nausea that made her retch the very lining of her guts…
      The blacksmith became frightened in his own right.
      ‘What’s the matter, wife? I said: What’s the mater?’
      Finally, Stylianoula  was able to blurt out in the midst of her throes:
     ‘I’m poisoned! The old hag poisoned me. Oh god, oh god.’
      She inhaled deeply. The shadow of death, passing over her eyes, made them dilate and bulge with dread.
   Suddenly Belios caught on. Seizing her hair and yanking it until he nearly lifted her off the ground, be brought her contorted and unrecognizable face close to his own at first, then dragged it next to the lamp that was hanging on the wall. In bringing it ear to the light in this way, he apparently wished to read the truth in those terror-stricken eyes, for he started into their depths with his face practically touching hers drove his gaze into her like a stiletto – until all at once, like a lightning bolt, the truth did flash through those glazed eyes that were goggling in paralyzed dismay. It was a truth that cast light for him, but at the same time burned him to the quick. ‘Slut!’ he howled. ‘So you got yourself with a child while I was away in the army, is that it? And you had that hag bring you an herb, and you took it to get rid of the bastard in your tummy? Right?
Still clutching her by the hair, he knocked her head against the wall. ‘Right, slut? And with my own mother as your bawd, eh? Viper! Whore! Lousy filthy whore!’
   ‘Forgive me, forgive …, forgive …’ whimpered his wife, who was dangling like a rag from his powerful fist, her body contracted like an injured snake’s because of the repeated pangs that were slicing through her entrails.

       Still pressing her against the wall, he began to kick her womb with the tip of his shoe and to slap her face while still banging her head against the plaster. Soon a wound opened in the back of her scalp and blood began to splatter the newly white-washed inglenook. In due course, she ceased to resist his blows any longer ot to implore his forgiveness. Instead, she commenced to groan softly and continously unsilencably. She sounded like an aggrieved child whining quietly in a corner. Eventually this muted wail died out as well, her body suddenly slumped inertly in his grasp, her arms thrashed limply this way and he pummeled her, the eyes rolled upwards until only the whites were visible, then went glazed beneath drooping lids.

           While this murder seems like an act of passion, understand that in ancient times husbands not only had the authority to murder their wives, but also their lovers. If murder was illegal in a certain city-state, then the wife was ostracized, leading her to be divorced not only from her husband, but society as well. She could not set foot in public temples, she could not wear jewelry, she certainly could not communicate with other women as she was now seen as filth. This double standard has existed much throughout history in most “civilized” nations leading the husband to have as many concubines and mistresses as he could afford because children from these affairs were simply illegitimate. However, the wife was not allowed this luxury. If she did have an affair, which would most likely be with one of the house slaves, she went to extraordinary measures to hide the evidence due to the consequences described above. I think it’s interesting that we celebrate the ancients Greeks as being a sexually open and free civilization, but women were still chained to the same constraints as they are today.



Eager Groom Shy Bride - Mary Evans



                                           

Bibliography

1) Riddle, John. (1994). Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance
               Harvard University Press, Massachusetts

Summary – This book did a phenomenal job of outlining the many different abortion practices that have occurred throughout history. It starts from antiquity and details not only the medical practices, but also the ethics behind abortion in these ancient civilizations.

2) Lonie , Iain. (1981) The Hippocratic Treatises “On Generation” “On the Nature of the 
            Child” “Diseases IV”.  New York. 

Summary – This book allowed me to study the thought processes of Hippocratic writers and how they felt about women and children. It allowed me to explore ancient sexism and a few details about abortion.

3) Kapparis, Konstantinos (2002) Abortion in the Ancient World London: Duckworth Publishers

Summary – This book was a great supplement to Professor Riddle’s book. In it Kapparis clearly describes the different abortion practices that took place in the ancient world; surgical, herbal, oral and mechanical means are all explained. What I found truly remarkable was that it also explored in great detail the thought processes of women who performed abortions knowing the immense risk involved.

4) King, Helen (1998) Hippocrates' woman: reading the female body in ancient Greece London:
              Routledge

Summary – Since Hippocractes had and continues to have an enormous impact on philsophy and politics, I wanted to see what hippocractic writers thought about the nature of women. It supplemented the Hippocratic Treatises well, but mostly it was a discussion on how women differ from men both in physiology and thought.

5) Aristotle Politics  (1885)

Summary – Along the same lines of The Hippocratic Treatises, I wanted to know how Aristotle felt about abortion and the rights of the unborn.

6) Riddle, John. (1992) Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge,
                MA:Harvard University Press, 1997)   

Summary – Was a great help in allowing me to compare the differences between the herbs that were used to perform abortion in ancient Egypt and Rome.

Medicine in Ancient Egypt

           Up until now my blog has focused mostly on ancient Greek and Roman practices in regards to abortion, but I wanted to see how other ancient societies, especially Egypt, dealt with this age old practice. The earliest surviving medical writings from Egypt are different papyri, the first being the Kahun Medical Papyrus and in it scholars found that the ancient Egyptians not only had clear knowledge of many of the diseases encountered today, but also dabbled with birth control. While abortion isn’t strictly mentioned, the use of contraceptives is. John Riddle’s book Contraception and abortion from the ancient world to the Renaissance does a great job outlining some very unique contraceptives.

                          Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology - Kahun Medical Papyrus


          Recipe I (Kahun. No. 21 [3, 6]):
          Not to become pregnant, that …’
          Feces of crocodile, smash up with fermented dough [or paste];
          soak …

          Recipe 2 (Kahun 22 [3, 7]);
          6/7 Pint of honey; sprinkle in her vagina.
          This is done with [hr, shm] of soda/saltpeter.
          Another Recipe.
          […mashed up] with fermented dough/paste, sprinkle in her vagina …

                Also, what I found really interesting was that ancient Egyptians revered animals as they were associated with different Egyptian gods. For example, crocodiles are associated with Seth, the god of chaos “who is also associated with thunder, desert and infertility” and according to Riddle, “Ancient Egyptian uterine amulets often have Seth on them”, thus to the ancient Egyptians, it made sense to use crocodile feces if one was planning to have an abortion or simply as a contraceptive. While this is quite different than the practices that were employed in ancient Rome and Greece, there are still some similarities especially as these recipes can be seen as herbal abortifacients which the Greeks used extensively. It’s also interesting to see that there are not many sources outside of these papyri that deal with pregnancy in ancient Egypt. One of the suggested reasons for this is that physicians and scientists were men and they were not involved during the pregnancy.
             The second ancient Papyrus (Ebers) provided me with much more information regarding ancient practices and while some scholars argue about the correct translation of the Papyrus, there are some passages which discuss how to perform an abortion using common herbs. It was also interesting to see that the Ebers papyrus is supposedly only a transcript of a much older book. “Although the Ebers scroll was written between 1550 and 1500 B.C.E, internal evidence indicates that the scribe writing it had before him a copy of a much earlier version. The prescriptions date back to the Old Kingdom” (Riddle, p.35).

                                                                    Ebers Papyrus
       One of the translated recipes reads: “To cause a woman to stop pregnancy in the first, second, or third period [trimester]:
          Unripe fruit of acacia
          Colocynth
          Dates
          Triturate with 6/7th pint of honey; moistern a pessayt of plant fiber and place in the vagina

        The reason that this recipe is so illuminating is not only because of the listed ingredients which have shown to be amazingly effective abortifacients in clinical trials, but it also shows that the ancient Egyptians knew the different stages of pregnancy really well (Riddle, p.36). This provides even more evidence for Homer’s claim in the Odyssey “In Egypt, the men are more skilled in medicine than any of human kind”.

4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days

The reason that I chose this clip was because I really wanted to highlight the dangerous and unnecessary situations that women endure in order to have an abortion in countries where abortion is illegal. Some context is also necessary, the hotel room that these women are currently in are also where they were raped by the man who performed the abortion. He simply gave them an ultimatum, either have sex or perform the abortion yourself (imagine your doctor asking you for payment in sex before your annual checkup). Also, There are no EMS personnel, there are no doctors, there are no spinal taps with morphine being injected, there is nothing to control the bleeding if she was to bleed out and even the father is not present. If something terrible happened, her friend could not call the cops or emergency services because they would be immediately prosecuted after treatment. While educating the masses about contraception and protective sex is greatly needed in many countries, we must make sure that an environment is not created where a woman must resort to such harsh measures in order to obtain an abortion.

Abortion throughout History

                Abortion has been one of the most controversial topics not only in the modern era, but can be traced back to fifth century B.C. While the philosophers and conveyors of ancient medicine had limited anatomical and medical knowledge, the concept of life and when it originates can still be found in these ancient texts. To truly study the issue of abortion, one must first study what human life is and how it begins according to the ancients (Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotelian doctors and various unnamed authors). There were three diverse schools of thought that really dominated the ancient period and truly showed that abortion was as contested a idea then as it is now. The first school of thought that I researched was the notion that human life beings at conception and while this idea is certainly popular today among specific religious circles, its origins can actually be traced back to the Pythagoreans (495 BC). According to Kapparis a reference is made in To Gauros, on how embroys are animated:

                      Living beings are born from each other from seed, and birth from earth is impossible. The seed  is a drop of brain containing hot steam inside. When it is deposited in the uterus, ichor and nerves and bones and hair and the entire body is composed. Soul and sense and produced from steam.

                This notion of forty days is important because followers of this thought believed that abortion was fine in the sense that if the fetus was aborted before 40 days then a human life wasn’t being aborted, but after 40 days, it was considered to be a human being and shared all the rights that are associated with living, breathing human beings. However, those who believed that a human was formed at the moment of conception obviously abhor the idea of abortion because no matter the time period of gestation, a human being is formed when the paternal sperm and maternal egg unite.  It was also interesting to see that this idea was attributed to Plato and his school by Galen and the unknown author of Whether what is carried in the womb is a living being.
             The second school of thought believed that human life beings at birth and while it was a visible minority, it really took off during the period of Hellenistic medicine and was promoted by the stoics (Kapparis p.42). It was attributed to Empedocles (490 BC) who denied the notion that an embryo was a living being. “Empedocles (said) that the embryo is not a living being, but (accepted) that it breathes in the womb, however, it breathes like a living being only after birth” (Kapparis p.41) This idea is interesting because in order to believe that life occurs at birth, then the air has to physically infuse the body with a soul in order to make it alive. Kapparis also notes that while these philosophers believed that the embryo wasn’t a human being, the issue of abortion was still not completely black and white. While they did not believe it was homicide, it wasn’t a justifiable practice either.
             The last school of thought believed that the human life begins while the fetus is growing (gradualist view) and was mostly championed by Galen and Hippocratic writers. The analogy most used in the texts and articles that I read compared the growing fetus to a seed. These ancients believed that as time passed, the womb would expand due to the growth of the fetus. As Hanson describes in “The Gradualist View of Fetal Development”, “Hippocratic doctors described the physical development of the fetus as happening gradually over the months of pregnancy, culminating in the vigorous animal-like creature who punched its way out from an inert womb at birth.” While these great philosophers were debating the issue of life, their writings had great impact on religious practices for centuries and continue to do so as I observed from reading the writings of Hippocrates. In volume 9, Hippocrates says “Fourty-day periods decide in fetuses first that any one which survives beyond the first fourty days will escape the miscarriages which occur all that time...when this term has passed, fetuses have become stronger and the body is differentiated” (Hippocrates p.91). St. Augustine picked up on this in (354-430 AD) when he claimed in Enchiridion that early abortion is not homicide. “But who is not rather disposed to think that unformed fetuses perish like seeds which have not fructified" (Pennington Law).
             As noted above, I kept returning to this notion of 40 days and even Aristotle believed that abortion before a certain point was considered to be just a method of population control. “people have a child as a result of intercourse in contravention of these regulations, abortion must be practised on it before it has developed sensation and life; for the line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive” (Politics book 7, section 1335b). The reason that I focused so much on the gradualist theory in regards to human life is because it is so pertinent today. Many of the laws that deal with abortion in America and other countries come strictly from the notion that the fetus becomes alive sometime during gestation. In the landmark case, Roe v. Wade, “the court ruled that states may not prevent women from having an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy. It did permit a state to forbid abortions during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, but it added the proviso "except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother." While the ancients were quick to forgo all ethical and moral dilemmas, regarding abortion when the mother’s life was at stake, some states today do not. Currently in Oklahoma, the state is deciding on a bill which would force women who are considering abortion to view and listen to the fetus through ultrasound technology which has become quite advanced in the last ten years as seen by the picture below.

Another law which is being considered in South Dakota would allow the killing of the physicians who abort fetuses (New York Times). This is quite disturbing because while the issue of abortion has remained constant throughout history, it seems that the modern society is more savage than the ancients.







    

Abortion throughout History

Abortion has been one of the most controversial topics not only in the modern era, but can be traced back to fifth century B.C. While the philosophers and conveyors of medicine did not know much about the human body back then, the concept of life and when it originates can still be found in these ancient texts. It was interesting and surprising to see the medication that these ancient doctors prescribed to induce abortion.  One such classical physician was Galen who is considered to be the foremost physician in classical antiquity and some of his prescriptions included "lupine, death carrot, two juniper species, wallflower or stock, squirting cucumber, woundwort, pepper, and the fern known as pteris" (Riddle). Riddle goes on to describe animal studies which have found squirting cucumbers to be quite effective as abortifacients. This parallel between ancient and modern medicine is important, because while these physicians of antiquity did not have the medical knowledge, they were still able to provide their patients with solutions to modern problems. Also, it is also important to note that while abortion was practiced sometimes heavily, the ethics and morality of abortion were just as convoluted as they are today. The poem written below illustrates how one Roman poet (Ovid)  felt about using dangerous agents such as the herbs described above, in order to terminate pregnancy. It also  shows that abortion was not only a contested idea between philosophers and politicians, but also was a concern among ordinary people (Kapparis).

Aiming to end her pregnancy - so rashly -
Corrina lies exhausted, life in doubt.
To run such fearful risks without my knowledge
Should make me rage, but fear's put rage to rout ...
O Isis ...
Turn your eyes here; on her - and me - have mercy;
You will give life to her and she to me ...
You too, kind Ilithyia, who take pity,
When girls are locked in labour, and relieve
Their hidden load, be present, hear my prayer