For the Medical Record - Mary Fissell
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Mia Levenson: Welcome back to another episode of For the Medical Record. My name is Mia Levenson.

Richard Del Rio: And I'm Richard Del Rio

Mia Levenson: And today we have Mary Fissell, the inaugural Jay Mario Molina Professor of the History of Medicine from here at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the president for the American Association for the History of Medicine. And we're here today to talk about her new book.

Richard Del Rio: " Pushback: The 2,500 Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion."

Mia Levenson: Mary, we're so excited to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Mary Fissell: Well, thank you so much for having me.

Mia Levenson: So I'll start off, um, I, I really, I told you this about last week. I loved this book. This was such a joy to read, and I am not one to [00:01:00] read very many popular histories, at least not outside my own research interests. Um, and in some ways this fits within my research interest, but regardless, to just give like the sort of like brief overview of the book, you trace this 2,500 year history of women obtaining abortions. You're primarily a historian of early modern Europe, so what kind of prompted you to say, I want to take this wider look at reproductive history.

Mary Fissell: That's a lovely question. 'cause it actually started here across the street from us. I teach in an abortionist public health course in the School of Public Health. I do one session in their eight week class on history. And for a while I'd been doing the kind of standard from the middle of the 19th century in America.

And then one year, I don't know what got into me. I was like, well wait, what would it look like if I started really earlier? And what I found out, just like, blew my mind. It was so interesting. [00:02:00] And so then I started with Ancient Rome with them, and that was in some ways the germ of the book. It is really scary to cover 2,500 years because obviously for most chapters you're not the expert.

That's not your home territory. But also I teach the survey course in the history of medicine every autumn, which is antiquity to 1700. So I was familiar with. Like how you can think about presenting the view from 10,000 feet. So once I started I was like, oh yeah, this is it. This is the way to go.

Mia Levenson: What were some of the things that you found that really like kind of uh, prompted that historian like aha moment?

Mary Fissell: I think first of all, I realized that most people don't know that women have been ending pregnancies for as far back in historical record as we can see. That's just a thing. People think it started in the 19th century. No, women have managed their fertility in this way forever. I think the second thing that was really clear [00:03:00] to me is that prohibition never works.

Never. It doesn't stop the practice. It just makes it more dangerous and difficult. What really surprised me when I was working on this topic though, was the corollary to that, which is that even when abortion is illegal, it's on the books as illegal, there are often very long periods of toleration in which people look the other way.

They don't ask difficult questions. They basically prioritize an individual woman's welfare over the letter of the law, and I didn't expect to see that. There's periods of intense restriction like we're living with right now in the United States, but they burn out pretty quickly and most of the rest of the time it's very unusual for a woman or a provider to be arrested, prosecuted, et cetera.

The fourth thing that I came to realize was that these moments of restriction [00:04:00] like we're living in now, are often prompted by gender backlash. Women have made some kinds of advances and conservatives get nervous and try to pull the arc of history back again. And this is one of the ways that they do it. And I hadn't recognized that it's not a progressive narrative. It's not a like onwards and upwards. It's more a kind of back and forth narrative. And if I may, I just wanna say one thing, which is that. When I'm talking about abortion in the past, I use the word women.

If I were talking about ending a pregnancy today, I would talk about pregnant people because we know the world is more complicated than a simple pink, blue binary would suggest. But because I argued that gender politics are really important for understanding abortion in the past, and it was people identified as women who were seeking to end pregnancies. I use the word women.

Richard Del Rio: So abortion, um, my understanding is a fairly modern word. [00:05:00] Um, through your research, through the several centuries that you covered, what other names or, uh, labels has this practice of terminating unwanted pregnancy been called? I think it would help our listeners, especially those who are looking for this early history to know what kind of words to look for.

Mary Fissell: That's an interesting question. And of course what lies behind that is the fact that there's researchers who say, oh, there's no abortion in the past 'cause they just look in the index under a for abortion and that's not the way forward. So it's a complicated landscape.

The word abortion actually meant more things than it does today. It included what we would call miscarriage or stillbirth for much of the millennium between a thou- 1000 and even 2000. As people who sought to restrict the practice, struggled [00:06:00] with, they had to find new ways of delimiting and intentional ending of a pregnancy from an unintentional one. And so for example, in the middle of the 19th century, American activists started calling it criminal abortion in order to distinguish it from what we would call pregnancy loss.

The other problem that underlies what you're asking is that in the past, I think pregnancy was understood very differently than it is today. Today we imagine it in trimesters. That's the legacy of Harry Blackmun. So he is the Supreme Court Justice who authored the ROE decision and over spring recess. He went back to the Mayo Clinic where he had been counsel to revise the draft, and it was in the medical library there that he understood the medical way of thinking in trimesters [00:07:00] about pregnancy that is encoded in ROE and became standard.

But before that, people thought about pregnancy in a before and after way. They thought about it as before what we call quickening or what they called quickening. Which is when a woman first feels a fetus move inside her, usually that's about halfway through a pregnancy. We think.

Before that it was extremely ambiguous. There were no easy markers of whether a woman was pregnant or not, and so often an early ending to a pregnancy could have been understood as restoring a menstrual cycle. And it was really important to have a regular menstrual cycle in humoral medicine. The dominant medical theory from antiquity to the middle of the 19th century. Women had to bleed every month to get rid of bad residues that would otherwise poison them.

So a woman could quite legitimately have been worried that she was late, but not worried in the way that we might worry. There was no easy [00:08:00] way to test for a pregnancy, no little at-home tests with the thin blue lines, none of that, and so it was very ambiguous for a number of months. So I think that our modern notion of ending of pregnancy is much more complicated in this kind of ambiguous field of force.

Of course, once quickening happened, then it was more apparent what was happening, but it only- that knowledge rested with the woman. She could share it or not as she chose. So very different landscape to what we have today.

Mia Levenson: I was really fascinated by how I, I had heard of this idea of the two halves of before and after quickening. Um, but the length of time at which that really was the standard for how people thought about pregnancy was, was a very new idea to me. And I, my biggest question in sort of articulating this for our listeners is, is when exactly does that shift happen and what, in your argument, what is sort of [00:09:00] prompting that shift in thinking between how people are conceptualizing what pregnancy actually is?

Mary Fissell: Well, I think this also rests on a larger, um, a larger way that historians of medicine think about the body. 'cause biologically I think we're pretty much the same as we were 2,500 years ago. We're probably better nourished on average, possibly over nourished on average. But, um, we're biologically pretty similar, but the way we imagine what our bodies are and what they do is radically different.

And I actually think that is really important for people to understand that we live in the bodies that we imagine in some ways, and that those imaginings matter, they're very fundamental of how we live our lives. So what I think is curious about the before and after model, the quickening model, is that it seems to have been there from [00:10:00] very early on, and what they argued about wasn't whether it was before and after, but when after began.

So for example, in antiquity, they argued about, well, was it formation, which is when they thought that a fetus assumed something like a human form. I don't think we'd think that today. Was it 30 days after conception? Was it 60 days after conception? Some people thought that males were formed before females.

Needless to say, none of this was of any use to an individual woman who wouldn't have known the sex of the fetus in any case, and probably couldn't have specified which exact night she got pregnant. So it's all very well for Aristotle and co. to think these things, but in a woman's life, it wasn't terribly relevant.

And then in the high Middle Ages, the. Christian Church decides to take a stand on ensoulment, which is the moment that a fetus got a soul again, an ineffable moment. How would anybody know? Right? How would anyone feel anything [00:11:00] to do with that? And they make the interesting choice to put it at quickening, which is really pretty late.

And so what had already been a kind of a before and after understanding gets instantiated in church law and has additional strength because after quickening for the church. It's a terrible sin before that. Mmm, it's a minor sin, like shouldn't have done that, but it, the two, the two understandings of the harm are very, very different.

And so I think that before and after lasts forever. Lasts well into the 20th century. Um, and I do think Roe v Wade is important in altering that into a trimester model. I think that the photographic work, the extraordinary photographs in Life Magazine in the early 1960s also contribute to that change.

Certainly for Embryologists, they understood development as continuous from the middle [00:12:00] of the 19th century, and so they didn't see it before and after, but I don't think ordinary people bought that. I don't think that mattered to them. I think it stayed before and after.

Mia Levenson: Something that really stuck out to me is how you make this connection between, or your, your argument is essentially that physicians in the mid 19th century, as they're trying to codify their own professional status, that they are sort of the big pushers, at least in the states for anti-abortion legislation. And I'm wondering why, why was it so important for physicians to specifically use abortion to delineate their, their social and professional position?

Mary Fissell: That's a very interesting question because it does seem surprising and it doesn't seem to look that way say in Great Britain. Or other easily, you know, other examples I can [00:13:00] think of. So I think the most important thing to understand is the complete lack of medical regulation in America that doesn't make it look like anywhere else, really. It's the wild west. Anyone can hang out a shingle basically, and claim to be a physician. You can go to a three month storefront school and learn. You could just follow a physician around and learn. Or you could go to one of our hallowed universities and go to medical school. So it's a really different universe.

And the men who are the architects of this anti-abortion campaign are the ones who went to the old universities like Harvard and Yale and Penn, and they were just outraged, basically, to be competing with these men who seemed to have no training at all and just really incensed about it. Now, why abortion is- that's somewhere in Horatio Robinson Storer's brain that I don't have access to. So Storer is the architect of this campaign. He starts a letter writing campaign. He identifies people who might agree with [00:14:00] him, and a lot of physicians don't agree with him. When he proposes this to the medical society in Massachusetts, mostly, they're like, oh, sit down, youngster, no, this is way too, this is way too challenging. Because physicians were used to helping. Their women patients to deal with their fertility issues. And in a competitive, crowded marketplace, no physician would wanna take a much needed and wanted procedure off the table.

That just doesn't make sense. So they could see that this would cause a lot of friction at the bedside and lose them. Patients, they didn't want that, but Storer persevered and somehow he got it through the AMA in 1859 and then, well then America had other problems on its hands, and so the anti-abortion campaign got a little bit slower, but fundamentally Storer's insistence that abortion was wrong and that doctors had to deal with.

This was [00:15:00] what swept the, the field, the one place he didn't intervene. The one place that he was too chicken was advertising because most women ended pregnancies with herbal preparations bought by mail order advertised in newspapers, and he recognized the power of pharmaceutical advertising basically for newspapers, and he didn't include that as part of this platform.

Mia Levenson: I just, it, the time period is so interesting because, you know, in the mid 19th century we're also getting women physicians, um, both women going to traditional orthodox medical schools, as well as the sort of litany of other naturopathic, homeopathic options. You also mentioned like water cures in your, in your book, um, and you also start seeing black men and women being admitted into medical schools. You're seeing by 1868 you have Harvard Uni, uh, Howard University [00:16:00] admitting medical students. So do you also see this kind of culture wars that are happening between both gender and racial politics also influencing why maybe abortion became this dividing point between the, the Orthodox white male, American Medical Association affiliated physicians and everyone else?

Mary Fissell: I think there's, that's one of the pieces. I think there's two reasons that state legislators were willing to pass laws against abortion. 'cause frankly, medicine was quite weak as a profession at that point.

I don't think state legislators would necessarily have all lined up at, you know, on the side of Orthodox elite medicine by any means. One of them is definitely gender and race politics. Absolutely. Storer couldn't stand. Women physicians thought it was a really bad idea. I wanted womanly women, whatever that would mean.

And so they're definitely threatened [00:17:00] by that kind of claim to authority. They wanna see as so often women in the home having children where they belong. And yes, you can hear the scare quotes in my voice. That was kind of their vision. But the other piece of it is that ugly, old fashioned American nativism, which is the fear that the wrong women are having babies and Storer definitely is part of that mix. He has a wonderful quote somewhere that says, you know, is the West gonna be populated by aliens? Shock, faint horror by aliens. He doesn't mean like little green Martians off of spacecraft, but he means immigrant children. And of course, America had seen waves of immigrants in the 1840s and fifties, Irish, Germans, et cetera.

And there were those who were afraid that somehow America wouldn't be America if it wasn't peopled by the descendants of WASPy, off the Mayflower types like Storer. And so racism feeds into that. But [00:18:00] initially, I think it's more that kind of they're worried about aliens, quote unquote. And then once the civil war is over, I think racism feeds into that as well.

So those two forces, the kind of anti first wave feminism and the nativism are really powerful currents in the middle of the 19th century that fuel the anti-abortion movement.

Richard Del Rio: And I think this dimension of your book or argument is particularly relevant given the circumstance we find ourselves in the present where, I would argue we have a very heightened sense of xenophobia at play in our politics.

And, you know, we have this language that masks that kind of same argument. Instead of saying the pioneers, you know, descendants of pioneers today, we call them the foundational stock of America. And that the wrong people are having children, people from countries that are outside of Europe and United [00:19:00] States.

Um, I found this to be especially relevant. I also think that, and I think Mia could speak a little bit more to this as well, but I think that it also connects to this kind of story of America's, I wouldn't say flirtation, but kind of, um, this, this dance America has with Eugenic policy. Particularly, on the one hand you have this idea of the wrong people are having babies, but then you also have, you know, based on what I'm seeing, uh, on the internet streets, you know what I'm seeing in the, in the black and brown social media, as you have pockets of people who are saying that, that abortion is also a means or rather abortions or sterilization, another term is, is a means of limiting a population. And as a means of control in this kind of weirdly imagined racial competition in our [00:20:00] democracy.

Can you speak to the kind of that, that, that return that, that, that strange pattern that we're seeing here?

Mary Fissell: Well, I think it's very rare to see sterilization on abortion twinned in the way that you just did. I don't see that. Um, the people who are eugenically minded are often anti-abortion, which like there's a logic there that might seem strange to you, but it makes some sense to them. And in terms of the complex history of Black Americans and abortion, there was a lot of concern that abortion was gonna be wielded as a tool to reduce black population.

The black abortion provider in Baltimore, whom I talk about in the last chapter of the book, fascinates me. He [00:21:00] graduated from me- Howard Medical School in like 1911/1912 and really early on writes an article about the evils of abortion, and he is writing to fellow black physicians saying, this is how they're gonna wipe us out. This is really wrong. And then somehow in the 1940s and fifties, he's an abortion provider in Baltimore. And I would love to know what changed his mind. I don't know. I don't think I'll ever know, but I'm guessing it may be the dire straits he saw his patients experiencing that may have changed his mind.

But that position that eugenics and abortion are really bad for black people. Yeah, agreed. Understood. That's a really important aspect of the story. In terms of today, I find the return of eugenic thinking one of the most frightening things that I see around. It's, you know, it seems to be popping up everywhere and in, in a weird coexistence with anti-abortion.

Mia Levenson: So in [00:22:00] talking about wanting to get into the head of, of this physician, I was really struck by the stories that you tell in this book that are so human right like that i, I think that was the thing that really struck me. Because oftentimes, you know, as historians we're sort of trained to, to feel very separated from our subjects and to not fabulate too much unless we're, you know, engaging in critical fabulation.

Um, and especially when so many of the stories of the women that you're telling that the stories are coming from records about them, coming from legal testimonies, maybe from medical medicine books, stories that that got told and retold, and I was curious how you approached both your archives, but also your writing, uh, knowing that you are looking and you're talking about these glimpses and these echoes, and these [00:23:00] fragments rather than sort of complete records.

Mary Fissell: Well, I think I've always liked fragments. I sometimes think that's why I'm an early modernist at heart. Um, I like the hermeneutics of really working with a source and going back to it and thinking about it again and trying to figure out how these fragments fit together. It's just intellectually something I enjoy.

In terms of the book, it was really important for me to talk about the women. There's lots of good books out there about law and medicine, and I wanted to talk about the women because I think this is an issue of hearts, not minds. I think if I can move a reader, it's because they can imagine a woman in the past and the circumstances that she faced, and I felt it was really important to put that on the page.

I am quite influenced by the reproductive justice movement in the book, and I thought it was important for people to understand that the model that people often resort to in abortion, which is like an unwed [00:24:00] woman, like, has a sexual encounter and then gets pregnant, doesn't mean to, and then chooses an abortion.

That, that, that's only one way. And for most of recorded time, most of the women who ended pregnancies were married, who already had children. Many of the women I write about had really lousy choices. They didn't have a whole lot of autonomy with which to choose, and that's part of the story also.

So I felt that I wanted to have a range of different kinds of stories so that you could imagine a range of different women. What that meant was I had to find a way to sit with these records for a while, to really think about them, to feel them even, and then to figure out how to. Write about these women in a way that helped the reader imagine how the world might've looked like from that woman's perspective.

I say might have, 'cause I can't [00:25:00] know, right? I very rarely have any individual woman's writing about something. Almost never. But to bring the woman to life, which was my narrative goal, I had to have that kind of imagining process. And I found it really moving, like some of the women, the, the, the woman that I talk about in chapter three, whom I know about because she went on trial as a witch, she was the same age as I was when I was writing that chapter.

And I have to say it was really hard knowing that she was gonna die. Knowing that she was gonna be executed for witchcraft. She wasn't a witch. She didn't even, never would've claimed that in her lifetime. She insisted that the healing that she did was purely natural, and I believe that's what she really thought.

And so that was really hard, that stuff. But I also think like we have to write about the [00:26:00] hard stuff and we have to have our readers read the hard stuff in order to make change happen.

Richard Del Rio: So, this book is in some ways geographically bound in the sense that it focuses on Europe, it focuses on the United States. And it's also temporarily limited in the sense that you stop about 50 years ahead of our own present day.

What was involved in those choices and how representative do you think that this story you're telling about abortion is for other parts of the globe where abortion is taking place? You know, I, I, for example, I can't help but think about how different this story must be in a place like China had that one child policy for so long. Um, I know that the question's a little big, but, uh, go ahead, play with it.

Mary Fissell: Sure. I mean, any historian is limited by their competencies, right?

Richard Del Rio: Mm-hmm.

Mary Fissell: And I was limited by the languages I can read and like I don't read any Asian languages. I don't [00:27:00] read any African languages, so that boxes me in pretty severely.

Plus, when you're covering 2,500 years, you kind of stick to like threads that you know to carry you through because otherwise you're just lost completely. So yes, I would love to read a book that attempted a synthetic approach to abortion in Asia, abortion in Africa. I would love to know, I think for Africa it's gonna be challenging given the lack of written records, by people themselves. But I'm like, I'd be cheering from the sidelines to see somebody take it on.

In terms of the timeline, I felt it was really important to show that women have ended pregnancies really far back, and the Hippocratic Corpus, the 60 texts from ancient Greece are full of reproductive stuff, like amazingly full of reproductive stuff.

In part that's because doctors wanted to help women have babies. It was really important for a wife to produce a son and heir. She didn't have to have a whole lot, [00:28:00] but that one son and heir was really crucial. So there's a lot of reproductive medicine in those texts. It's fascinating. And lucky for me who doesn't read Greek, there is excellent translations and so I had a wonderful time working on that material. I mean, just, I had no idea it was quite that full.

In terms of where to end. I am a pre-modern at heart, and to get to 1973 was hard. And I felt like there's so much good recent history of abortion and of public policy that there was no need for me to go there in some ways, that getting to Roe v. Wade was a kind of natural stopping point.

I did, to my surprise, love working on abortion in 1940s and 50s, Baltimore, which I didn't expect to like the way I did, and I just, I really enjoyed that material. I'm happy to say more about it.

Richard Del Rio: Why did you like it so much?

Mary Fissell: Well, I came to realize that I approached it like an early modernist [00:29:00] would, and I realized this initially when I was working on the Victorian chapter.

There's ways in which early modernists like me are trained to dig really deeply into the source. I'm not saying 20th century people are trivial. I'm not saying that, but because we have so little, we struggle really hard to make connections and we dig really deep. We're bulldogs. And I started working on the Baltimore material, almost like by chance because our colleague, Graham Mooney gave me some newspaper clippings digitally.

He said, I came across this case of a black provider in West Baltimore and I thought you'd be interested. And I was like, huh, interesting. And they course sat on my hard drive for a little while and then I started poking around on them and I was like, oh, this is really interesting. And so once I realized how rich digitized newspapers were for this time period and how much combined with ancestry.com you could actually find out about individuals' lives, I mean, I was off to the races. I thought it was [00:30:00] great.

And it had real meaning for me to work on someplace that I lived, that I hadn't done since I did dissertation research a long time ago when I was living in Bristol, the subject of my dissertation and first book.

And to realize. I don't know how to articulate this exactly, and I've thought about it a lot. The kind of, it was as if I was walking through a city of shadows that when I realized that, like when I used to drive my son into high school, I drove past George Timanus's office, the major physician provider of the interwar years, or when I did a book event in Remington, I was two blocks away from the site of the house of the woman who I talk about in the chapter as a small scale abortion provider. It has a really different feeling when you move through that kind of city of shadows that I found really rich and really thought provoking. For me,

Richard Del Rio: I, I, I, I found that chapter particularly interesting as well, particularly the portion about the [00:31:00] abortion squads that were being used by the police.

I would love to hear you talk a little bit about that, especially their method of investigation because different, it's kind of almost distinct from what we read about today in the sense of tracing pregnant women at the border, if they're crossing a state line to get an abortion, or just following the patient. In this case, police, women themselves are doing the work of capturing. Could you elaborate on that?

Mary Fissell: Sure. I was really shocked by this and fascinated, and I would love to do more work on the police women because like, who knew? Right? So what happens is that in the. 1940s, there's a new wave of repression. There'd been a repression period of repression around the turn of the century. This new wave of repression is different in that it is based on associating abortion with [00:32:00] organized crime and with communism. So abortion takes on new kind of threatening meanings for people.

And because they imagine it as organized crime, they do the kinds of things that you would do to entrap people. And so the abortion squad is consists of these two women and a bunch of male officers, and they set up stings in order to try to entrap women who are seeking to end a pregnancy. And so they have this whole process where one of the police women contacts a provider or the contact for the provider and sings a sob story about how she just can't have this baby. And then the, you know, the appointment gets set up and the police woman goes to the appointment for the abortion and is literally, I think on somebody's kitchen table basically, when they blow the whistle and the cops come in and everyone's arrested.

So that's a really like horrible form of [00:33:00] policing. And of course it's a cat and mouse game because once abortion providers understand this, they understand like, oh, they have to really worry when a bunch of cars are staking out their place. Endless, thousands of police hours are spent staking out places and they learn they have to be really careful 'cause phones are tapped.

So one of the abortion providers that I looked at. Told perspective clients that when they called, they should ask about rose pattern as if they were looking for China rather than looking to end a pregnancy. So it's this total cat and mouse game all the time, and I really would love to get in the head of those police women because it must have been really hard being a police woman in the 1950s.

Police women traditionally came from the juvenile justice system, and the one I know the most about came from the juvenile justice system because they were seen as the right kind of people. They'd already been helping juvenile delinquents. It fit with the whole maternal role.

And then I can see how by the [00:34:00] fifties they've arrested and prosecuted the safe physician providers. And then what's left is sort of the unsafe practitioners who take up abortion practice without adequate training. So I can imagine how one of those police women could have thought that she was saving women's lives by saving them from these terrible practitioners. But I don't know, maybe she thought life began a conception and she was doing work that way. I just, I don't know.

Mia Levenson: So in thinking about this moment that you end on the book, right, which is the, the repeal of Roe v. Wade. And something I've noticed over the past few years is that there's been a lot of media and books written about, about the history of, of abortion, right?

You get movies about the Jane Collective. Uh, there were two books in the past few years about specifically Madame Restelle in [00:35:00] New York City, the the famous abortion provider. And you know, with your book out, I'm, I'm curious to hear from you of like, what, what does your book both add to this history and, how does it fit into kind of this cosmos of looking back at, at the history of abortion?

Mary Fissell: Well, I think maybe what I'm gonna say might be a little repetitive, but I think to understand this has been going on for millennia, not for centuries, is really important and that prohibition never works. I think that's like a really important point in our current moment.

The other strand that I emphasize in the book is that abortion is healthcare, and that is absolutely crucial for our current moment. And it appalls me that we knew that an incomplete miscarriage could kill a woman in the fourth century, BCE and the remains of dealing with it, they were brutal, they were tough. But the choice was that or the woman died. And today we face a situation in which women [00:36:00] are dying in parking lots because they're not getting the healthcare that they need. That I find utterly appalling. And I think we can't say too frequently and too loudly that abortion is healthcare.

We absolutely need to learn that lesson for today, and books that focus on legislation or policy changes. I'm not sure emphasize that as much as a historian medicine might.

Richard Del Rio: With that in mind, I understand it's a, it's a trade book, we want everyone to buy it. But who did you feel like really needed to read it? Who Did you imagine that you wish you could just manifest this book on, on a certain person's reading table and say, this is a person I really need to read this book.

Mary Fissell: I don't think I thought about it exactly like that. I think obviously my ideal reader was probably a woman, not that men aren't involved in. Deciding things and not involved in abortion, they are. But I did think [00:37:00] that your kind of ordinary interested woman reader was my target audience.

My second target audiences providers, because I think it's important that they also understand the long history that they're a part of and understand the kind of work that's gone before. I, I just think it's interesting for them to know what came before and. Helpful possibly to understand the very long lineage that they're a part of.

Richard Del Rio: Thank you so much, Dr. Mary Fissell. The title of the book is "Pushback: The 2,500 Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion." From Seal Press, out now. Pick it Up. Interesting read.

Mia Levenson: Thank you so much, Mary, for joining us today.

Mary Fissell: Thank you so much for having me.