REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS

Dissecting pieces of literature that contributed to the United States’ reproductive health crisis.

To Ruden, a translator and cultural historian, anti-abortion propaganda finds its roots in seven canonical texts. She starts with Roman bad boy Ovid, who impregnates his girlfriend and lambastes her when she gets an abortion. Ruden likens him to a “conservative politician in imperialistic America.” Next, she traces fertility-related misogyny to the New Testament’s Pastoral Epistles, which restricted Christian women’s bathing, making them “[reek] like a goat,” lowering their self-esteem, and usable at will for childbearing. The author’s prose is replete with such vivid writing, making us pinch our noses—not at the women, but at the politically ambitious men who restricted their reproductive health choices. Augustine—who promoted an ideology of celibacy following a difficult relationship with his mother—prompts a similar recoil, as do the witch-hunting Dominican monks of the Middle Ages. Ruden deftly ties these men’s turbulent personal lives to their reproductive health teachings and subsequent rancor toward women. Charles Dickens, in Ruden’s view, wasn’t just a chronicler of Victorian England but a survivor of childhood neglect who propagated Victorian morals that forced women into early marriages and produced the large families needed to fill the first factories with cheap child labor. Curiously, anti-abortion advocate Marie Stopes isn’t judged quite as harshly as her male predecessors. Ruden writes that the collective trauma from World War I that Stopes suffered—she was a “thoughtful, highly educated person,” but also a eugenicist who believed poor people’s fertility should be curtailed—was probably felt more keenly than that of her lower-born contemporaries, who supposedly had “thick skins.” Equally puzzling is the book’s portrayal of a woman who survived her mother’s abortion attempt as a “living script,” stripping her of any views of her own. Those passages aside, Ruden successfully advocates for a world governed by saner reproductive health policies, and, arguably, happier men.

A timeless treatise on how “totalitarian” men try to consolidate power by controlling women’s bodies.