Date/Time
Thursday
19 Feb 2026
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
470 Stephens Hall
Event Type
Colloquium
Mary Fissell
Professor of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University
Abortion only rarely went to court in early-modern England or the American colonies. Before 1803, there was no English criminal statute prohibiting it. Yet the 2022 Dobbs decision declared that abortion had always been perceived as wrong in England and early America. This talk explores a few unusually-detailed legal cases as well as medical sources to explore how seventeenth-century people understood ending a pregnancy.
