For centuries, abortion was not just restricted—it was punishable by death, as women like Anna Harding were tortured and executed for providing reproductive care.
Excerpted from Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion by Mary Fissell.
In centuries to come, women like Adelheid would face much stricter penalties than this.
One was Anna Harding. In 1618, in the German town of Eichstätt, Harding was interrogated repeatedly about her life and abortion practice, sometimes under torture. Harding told the court about the reproductive services she provided for local women.
She had been born in Swabia, farther east, and moved to Eichstätt around 1600, although she may have also lived there previously.
At the time of her trial, she was 64 and had been widowed for many years. Women consulted her about their periods: Was the flow too heavy? Did it fail to return? She could, in effect, turn the tap off or on with her herbal preparations.
She told the court the names of the herbs she used: alamander, muselblue and galgans. These names cannot (yet) be mapped fully onto plant names we know today. The first may refer to alexander, a wildflower that looks like Queen Ann’s lace, known as an abortifacient since antiquity. “Galgans” probably refers to the East Asian spice galangal, used as an abortifacient in other German communities. “Muselblue” remains a mystery.
Some of Harding’s patients were unmarried women. When Maria Mayr got pregnant, Harding provided the herbs that caused an abortion, hiding Maria’s shame so that she was able to marry blamelessly a few years later. Harding treated the daughters of Father Johann Reichard’s cook, the daughter of a bricklayer from Obereichstätt and many others for stopped menses. She also cared for married women, including Eva, the wife of the butcher Biebel Lenz, helping her restart stopped menses. When Eva had tired of her husband’s sexual attentions, Harding gave her herbs that would make him impotent. But the healer refused to help a gravedigger’s wife, implying that the woman might have been trying to hide an adulterous affair.
During the time between Adelheid’s exile across the Rhine and Harding’s interrogation in Eichstätt, the meanings and legal status of abortion had changed profoundly in Europe. Abortion was now a capital crime in some places; women could be—and were—executed for either providing or getting an abortion. One of the triggers for these new abortion laws was the 16th century Protestant Reformation, which profoundly altered gender relations, stressing the sanctity of marriage and penalizing extramarital sex. In newly Protestant places, clergy were now allowed—even encouraged—to marry. The Catholic hierarchy responded to the rupture of European Christianity with a period of intense self-scrutiny and recommitment to the faith that historians call the Catholic Reformation.
Abortion was now a capital crime in some places; women could be—and were—executed for either providing or getting an abortion.
Across confessional divides, religious leaders sought to reform the sexual behaviors of their flocks. New laws against abortion were a part of such campaigns, because abortion was imagined as a sign of illicit sexual relations. Such laws were usually intended to regulate the sexual behaviors of unmarried women. Everyone knew that infants were fragile creatures, and no one would inquire if a married woman miscarried or lost a newborn. Single women, desperate to hide pregnancy, were the usual focus of prosecution. But older women were tried for providing abortions, too. Sometimes a mother was executed for helping her daughter end a pregnancy.
While cities and states began to punish abortion much more strictly in the 16th century, knowledge about how to provoke an abortion remained widespread, often communicated from one woman to another. In Constance in 1597, Anna Dischler took savin from a garden grown by a painter’s wife and then bought wild ginger at a shop in town. Because such abortifacient herbs were often also general-purpose purges, her request might not have prompted an apothecary to ask any awkward questions.
Or let’s eavesdrop on a 1665 conversation between a maidservant and her mistress as they walked home from the fields in the German territory of Swabia, where Anna Harding had been born. The mistress noticed some red pennyroyal and instructed her servant that this was a good medicine for women whose periods did not come as expected.
She remembered back to the terrible time during the Thirty Years’ War, two decades earlier, when a local woman had used the herb to abort after being impregnated by a soldier. As it happened, the mistress’ son was pressuring the maidservant into sex. Perhaps with this piece of local history, the mistress was also offering covert instruction about how to deal with an unwanted pregnancy much closer to home. If this were the case, the message was received: the servant later took the same red pennyroyal when she found herself pregnant. But her employer’s attempts at discretion failed; the servant ended up in court.
And so it was in Eichstätt. In 1612, the region’s new prince-bishop, Christoph von Westerstetten, pursued an aggressive policy to ensure that his territory remained Catholic. Some neighboring areas had become Protestant, and he was worried. A ruler both temporal and spiritual, Westerstetten welcomed the Jesuit order, known for educational and missionary work, to Eichstätt, and joined the Catholic League, an alliance of territories defending themselves against the tide of Lutheranism. He cracked down on local practices now deemed superstitious or irreligious, from extramarital sexual relations to wild parties on Fastnacht, on the eve of Lent. The Jesuits, meanwhile, instituted new forms of devotion, such as penitential processions in town and blessings of the fields to protect them from hail.
In 1617, a team of witch commissioners started investigating in Eichstätt. While there had been a flurry of witchcraft trials in the region in the 1590s, now the commissioners fomented a full-blown panic that ultimately resulted in the execution of 175 women and a small number of men. These numbers are startlingly high. This was a small and sparsely populated area that had already lost as much as half its population from poor harvests due to prolonged bad weather.
Despite such hard times, the trials seem not to have evoked the stories of neighborly resentments often seen in other witch trials, nor were those accused the most marginal in their community. Witnesses refused to corroborate stories produced under torture, and friends and neighbors even brought food to those in jail, risking being associated with witchcraft themselves.
After Anna Harding was accused in 1618, she was visited by at least two of her clients, Barbara Rabel and Eva Susanna Moringer, and by a friend, the vicar’s cook Anna Maria, who also did sex work. It’s possible that they wanted to make sure Harding did not implicate them, but maybe they brought comfort as well.
The witchcraft commissioners used a list of 84 questions to interrogate suspects, 22 of which concerned the accused’s personal life and moral status. When had she met her husband? Had they had sex together before marriage? How many children did she have, and were they living or dead? With whom did she “keep company”?
The questions planted the idea of demonic sex, asking when—not if—the accused had had a relationship with a demon, whether she desired him, and how often they had sex. Further questions modeled a gathering of witches at night, with detailed inquiry into the food served, the topics of conversation, the dancing and even how the accused managed to slip out of the house with no one noticing.
Abortion became associated with witchcraft because it was a routine part of women’s lives and healing practices.
As in so many other instances, the interrogators often got the answers they wanted, confirming the basic narrative of demonic sex laid out by the Malleus. Harding initially resisted their implications. Although three babies of the many she treated had died, they had been given regular herbal medicines, not some magical ointments. She had given the butcher’s wife herbs to make the butcher impotent, but again, this was no magic. About a month after her arrest in January 1618, Harding told the commissioners firmly that she “was certainly no such person and the lord commissioners would not want to wash their hands in her blood.” She was tortured in the town square, and cried out, “Jesus, Mary, help, I am no witch.”
After torture, Anna began to confess, offering a tale about a demon who came to her in the form of a nobleman from Freihalden. This encounter may have been about the time that she started sex work; Freihalden is near Markt Jettingen, and it is easy to see how she might have imaginatively transmuted sex with a well-to-do client into a narrative about a relationship with a demon. Yet even under torture, she continued to deny that her healing practices were witchcraft.
In June 1618, Anna Harding was convicted and burned at the stake. She had worked as a healer for decades. She and other women like her had their ordinary medical practices transformed into evidence of magic by misogynist fantasies of male interrogators and a larger cultural shift that sought to control female sexuality in the interests of Church and state. Abortion became associated with witchcraft because it was a routine part of women’s lives and healing practices. Those associations had power in a society that increasingly sought to restrict female sexuality and punish women who violated new norms about marital sex.
Anna Harding had the grave misfortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, to be swept up in a witchcraft panic. Like us, she was living in a moment when abortion was increasingly restricted, part of a larger pattern of gender backlash. Her life was shaped by many of the same forces as those of her clients: poverty, misogyny, migration. Both she and the women who sought her services were vilified when the witchfinders started torturing people. Her story shows us how larger forces shaped the landscape of reproductive restriction, from religious reformation to warfare, but it also shows us that despite severe penalties, abortion remained commonplace. Women were caught in the crossfire in so many ways in Anna Harding’s world. Abortion was sometimes an obvious solution to their woes, even when it carried the risk of execution.
In the centuries that followed, the rich European knowledge of abortion-producing plants that Harding and others drew upon would travel farther afield, as Europeans began exploring the world across the Atlantic. Enslaved women from Africa, Indigenous Americans, and settler Europeans created new traditions of healing, often in circumstances they had not chosen.
