Tara Mulder

“The Invention of Abortion in Ancient Rome” argues that the early to high Roman Empire (first century BCE through third century CE) saw the invention of an idea of abortion—as the intentional killing of an unborn child—that had not previously existed in any widespread or meaningful way in the earlier cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Contrary to previous research, this project shows that increasing opposition to abortion was not solely or even primarily due to the rise of Christianity. Rather, Christian attitudes towards the unborn were but one piece of a larger antiabortion zeitgeist that was equally secular and pagan. At the same time, the Romans were also inventing an antiabortion past that had not previously existed, refashioning earlier medical and political figures such as Hippocrates and Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, as antiabortion icons. Such historiographical rewriting has reverberations in the present where this strategy has similarly been a key component of antiabortion activism in the United States.