If 9th-Century Monks Understood A Woman's Right To Choose, Why Don't We?

Family planning, including abortion, was totally accepted in the Middle Ages. What's so behind in our modern thinking?

Medieval women had readily available abortion access. Why don’t these women?

Despite the rallying cry, “We’re not going back,” women’s reproductive rights have already been diminished and we are on our way to the pre-modern era. Project 2025, a blueprint for the next Trump Administration, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas threaten to erode what legalities remain.

Okay then. If we are going back to the Middle Ages, let’s do things the medieval way. Saint Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German abbess, theologian, composer, healer, and (as of 2012) Doctor of the Catholic Church, helped to end unwanted pregnancies by herbal means. Monks and university hospitals of her era also helped women conceive, get abortions, and protect themselves from the consequences of rape. Of course, it wasn’t all foolproof. While they could not have imagined in vitro fertilization, they had their own approach to helping couples become parents.

At the University of Salerno in Italy, a renowned medical center in the 11th and 12th centuries, many respected healers were female. One named Trota figures in its writings and possibly wrote one of its texts, according to Monica H. Green in her book, The Trotula, an English translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine. 

This text suggests that those struggling to conceive do as follows: add the urine of the would-be father to a pot filled with bran. In a second separate pot with that grain derivative, add the urine of the prospective mother. Nine or ten days later, check the containers for worms. If they appear in either or both pots, the couple will remain barren. If no worms are seen, both parties are fertile. To conceive a male child (which one assumes they hoped for), the husband should acquire the vagina of a hare and dry and grind it to powder. He should then drink this powder in a glass of wine. If the wife wishes to deal with the situation herself, she should follow the same procedure save for the substitution of dried testicles.

Then there is the matter of contraception. The few suggestions from that same compendium offer women who wish to avoid pregnancy several options: wearing against their naked flesh the womb of a goat that has never given birth; holding a piece of jet; or carrying weasel testicles tied in goose skin in their bosoms. These lead inevitably to solutions for terminating a pregnancy. They had proven methods to produce an abortion.

Medievals were uncertain about the gestation period of a healthy baby. A fertilized egg became a human child only when recognizable limbs appeared, which today we know occurs about ten weeks after conception. Until that point, a woman could take an herbal remedy to restart her menstrual cycle, which of course would end pregnancy without committing the sin of abortion.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen offered several methods for achieving this result in her tome of herbal medicinal formulas called Physic. A notable one called for making a sauna with vapors from a sun-lit, freely flowing stream infused with a solution of tansy, feverfew, and mullein. Entering the sauna, the patient should sit on a seat covered with these warmed herbs. Throughout the day she should drink a potion of more herbs and berries and continue this regimen until she experiences the desired result.

Hildegard is credited as the first healer to write about tansy, but monks had already been helping women to avoid unwelcome motherhood for hundreds of years. One of the 9th century Lorsch Manuscripts, written by Benedictine brothers in what is now Germany, reveals a prescription of anti-fertility agents, including white pepper, which was then known to abort animals as well as humans.

The physicians of Salerno, knowing they were often fighting to save a woman’s life or freedom in the face of a culture that punished women for being raped, developed several methods to create the appearance of virginity. The most foolproof was to carefully place leeches in the patient’s vagina the night before the wedding and allow them to remain for a few minutes until blood flowed. Since scabs would not have healed by the next day, the bride’s blood would flow at the moment the marriage was consummated.

All pretty tricky. Medieval women sought control over their own lives and bodies just as their descendants do today. The history of medicine has been a story of progress. At least until now. Justice Thomas, outlaw herbs and leeches if you can.

Kathleen Brady is the author of Francis and Clare: The Struggles of the Saints of Assisi, which won an award in biography from the Catholic Media Association in 2022. Ida Tarbell and Lucille Ball were the subjects of her earlier biographies.