Mary Fissell presents PUSHBACK

Registration for this event is not required; however, in the case of a full event, your registration will reserve your seat.

Mary Fissell joins us in Remington to discuss her new book Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion, in conversation with Kathleen Crowther!

The Baltimore Abortion Fund (BAF) will be offering information and accepting donations at this event.

ABOUT PUSHBACK:

The long history of how restricting access to abortion has been used to curtail women’s advancement

Attitudes about abortion cycle between long periods of widespread tolerance, to repression, and back again. What accounts for these pendulum swings? From ancient Greece to the modern West, historian of medicine Mary Fissell argues, abortion repression springs up in response to men’s anxieties about women’s increasing independence.

In Pushback, Fissell shows that, across centuries and continents, abortion has always been commonplace, and persecuting women for ending pregnancies has been about controlling their behavior. As Protestantism de-emphasized celibacy, new abortion restrictions policed unmarried women’s sex lives. Nineteenth-century men unsettled by first-wave feminism hoped to establish medicine as a male profession, and so advocated for abortion bans to undercut women’s new roles as physicians. Fissell presents this history through the hidden stories of women committed to reproductive self-determination: holy women of the early Catholic Church whose ability to end pregnancies was considered miraculous, midwives accused of witchcraft or criminal conspiracy, and everyday women whose pregnancies threatened their livelihoods—and their lives.

Pushback is essential reading for understanding the complex history of abortion and making sense of recent crackdowns on reproductive rights.

Pushback releases on Tuesday, March 11 and is available for preorder at greedyreads.com!

Mary Fissell is the inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on sex, gender and reproduction. The author of Vernacular Bodies, among others, she has featured on the BBC, and in Vice, Slate, the Washington Post and the New York Times. In her spare time, she is a metalsmith.

Kathleen Crowther is an associate professor in the Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Policing Pregnant Bodies from Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) and has written for The Atlantic, Washington Post, Gastro Obscura, Popula, The Public Medievalist and Nursing Clio.

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