2005, Journal of Women’s History
Throughout Western history, abortion has been a contentious issue; nevertheless, ethically and legally, society has drawn a line between voluntary and involuntary abortion. Women who bring an abortion on themselves by enlisting the services of a medical practitioner or by imbibing venomous draughts have rarely managed to draw sympathy from the communities in which they live. On the other hand, pregnant women who become the victims of brutal assault and miscarry as a result, have been treated in a different manner entirely. According to medieval common law, if the foetus had already been endowed with a soul (roughly around the third month), such an attack was indeed homicide. It has been argued, however, that in practice, English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as such. Cyril C. Means, Jr. maintains that not only was an abortion not felonious in medieval England, it was not even criminal. More recently, John M. Riddle reminds us that we “must distinguish between legal principles as known by jurists and the principles of fact on which juries were willing to find people guilty.” While medieval common law probably viewed abortion by assault as a crime, English jurors did not. The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, like rape, male jurors are loath to impose the death penalty. Both Means and Riddle base their conclusions on a mere handful of cases. A greater number of cases presents a much different view. While conviction rates for assault on pregnant women are very low (not unusual given the general reticence of jurors to convict for any felony), the responses of those involved demonstrate that Englishmen and women certainly believed it was a crime of felonious proportions. Moreover, the role played by husbands as plaintiffs makes it clear that this was not merely a women’s issue. As the recent work of Becky R. Lee and Fiona Harris Stoertz indicate, the birth of a child was a moment of great pride and celebration for medieval men; they not only cared for the welfare of their unborn children, but also the future health and fertility of their wives. Abortion by assault was never an easy judgment for jurors to deliver; but there is very little reason to believe it was not a criminal matter, taken seriously by plaintiffs, jurors and defendants.
2007, Journal of Women’s History, Special Issue: Domestic Violence in History
Since Barbara Kellum’s pioneering work on child murder in medieval England, published in 1973, medieval historians have argued that the courts adopted an approach to child murder that highlighted “the casual nature and mild consequences of infanticide in late medieval England.” Kellum concluded that royal officials rarely bothered to prosecute either infanticide or filicide, and justices and jurors treated those cases that did appear in the courts with lenience: specifically, Kellum argues that the courts viewed child murdering mothers as mentally incompetent and thus awarded them pardons. Further compounding the argument, Barbara Hanawalt has noted that a mother was not even guilty of homicide in the killing of her infant until the mid-sixteenth century under statute law, thus medieval “jurors may have been unclear whether or not indictment was appropriate.” The goal of this paper is to test these commonly held assumptions about child murder, employing a sampling of 131 instances of child murder (comprising 144 victims) from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries in England. In particular, this paper will argue that infanticide was a felony in the Middle Ages and that neither jurors nor royal officials treated child murder with indifference. In fact, there is no reason to believe that the English royal courts treated the murder of infants or older children as anything less than homicide. This paper will ask a number of pertinent questions in order to uncover the nature of medieval child murder and its treatment in the courts of medieval England. How did royal officials and jurors react to cases of child murder? Was this a woman’s crime (in particular, was this a singlewoman’s crime)? Were the victims usually female? Finally, what happened to child murderers? For the purposes of this paper, child murder as a category is restricted to cases of infanticide by a parent (homicide of an infant, from newborns up to the age of one), and filicide (homicide of young children, that is under the age of seven).
2019, Law and History Review
Common law was an all-male system, with one glaring exception: juries of matrons. If a convicted felon requested a reprieve from execution on the grounds of pregnancy, it was the responsibility of a group of twelve matrons to perform an inspection in order to determine if she was in fact pregnant. Matrons were in a position of great authority. Their verdicts were definitive: if they decided a woman was pregnant, then she was sent back to prison. Despite the significance of their role, little is known about medieval matrons and what qualified them to sit on a jury. Were they mothers? Honorable wives? Midwives? The goal of this paper is to argue that matrons had training in obstetrics. This was particularly important for medieval matrons because the quickening (that is ensoulment, signaled by the first fetal movements) did not become the focal point of the matrons' assessment until at least 1348. Before this, the diagnosis was much more medically challenging as matrons had to determine whether a felon had conceived. Overall, the medieval records demonstrate great confidence in medieval matrons and their obstetrical expertise.
2006, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Alexander Murray has written that, in the Middle Ages, women were more frequently excused of suicide because “female suicide was just too horrible to think about.” Murray’s perspective builds on a heritage of ideas about chivalry and modesty. Christian hagiography, replete with stories about the deaths of virgin martyrs, women who killed themselves rather than jeopardise their vows of chastity, in particular, would seem to pardon female suicides. More generally, historians have had difficulty imagining that medieval society imposed the full weight of the law on self-killers. At a time when a suicide was refused proper burial in consecrated ground, interred at a crossroads with a stake through its heart, and all its goods and property were confiscated by the king, merciful declarations of non compos mentis would seem most fitting. An examination of 718 cases of suicide from coroners and eyre rolls, however, suggests that this was not the case. Medieval juries usually declared a suicide felonious. This rule holds true also for medieval women, who played a significant role in the crime. In fact, medieval Englishwomen were far more likely to participate in suicide than in any other felony. The treatment of female suicides by juries certainly demonstrates a degree of compassion; and yet, more often than not, their verdicts show signs of malice and resentment. An investigation of cases of female suicide in these documents opens a window into the minds of medieval jurors to reveal their attitudes towards female suicide in a wide variety of situations; at the same time, these cases offer evidence to explain why medieval women sometimes resorted to suicide.
In our society women are often been considered to have a need to have protection, it is said that they are not safe alone they need the male counterpart for their protection, though it sounds paradoxical but is a fact that even the women, irrespective of the strata they belong or qualification they possess or they are economically independent or not , have a view that they feel safe and secure in the presence of a male member with them. Incidents are found in our society whereby a adult woman going out even been asked to be accompanied by her minor brother or son, the psychology behind this is just that being escorted by a male they would be safe. Now the question arise that if, god forbid, anything happened what the woman will suppose to do? Weren’t she got puzzled whether to protect herself or to the minor accompanying her? Yes, safety and security is of utmost importance for every individual and women being treated as vulnerable, her safety and security should be given the paramount connotation. This is the case when she is going outside her home but is she safe within the precincts of the house?
2002, Pregnant Woman and Unborn Child: Legal Adversaries
“Reproduction and Regulation in Early Modern Europe,” The Routledge History of Sex and the Body in the West, 1500 to the Present, Sarah Toulalan and Fisher, eds (New York: Routledge, 2013), 351-71. Selected CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2013.
2012, Canadian Journal of History
Conflicts between parish clergy and parishioners in late medieval England have been described as acts of both anticlericalism and proclericalism (that is, an attempt to compel clergy into living up to the parishioners’ increasingly high expectations of them). This paper hopes to expand our knowledge of parish conflict by turning to an oft-neglected source. In his 2002 book Selling the Church, Robert Palmer contended that we must turn to the king’s courts to better understand conflicts with the church, because both the clergy and the laity frequently preferred the king’s justice to the church’s. This paper also turns to the king’s courts, this time to the courts of equity. Examining a sampling of cases involving parish violence this paper hopes to offer a greater appreciation for the variety of sentiment existing in England prior to the Reformation.
This research study discusses how religion plays a significant role in determining whether any particular abortion is permissible. It also compares the laws, both statutory and customary, with respect to the permissibility of abortion and recognition of the basic human rights of women. However, both the Islamic and the Catholic teachings allow termination of pregnancy under a common circumstance where the fetus poses a threat to the life of the mother. The Islamic laws permits abortion within 120 days of conception or before the ensoulment of the fetus and abortion after the expiry of the four months entitles the woman to pay blood money to the relatives of the fetus. According to the Catholic beliefs, the killing of a fetus is a sin and no condition is sufficient enough to justify the killing of the fetus. This study also reflects the viewpoint of the human rights committee which prioritizes the life of the mother before the child as it believes that the source of life of the fetus is the mother. Hence, it is the basic human right of the mother to decide whether to continue with the pregnancy. In this research paper, the researcher has focused on the abortion process in the Sharia law where it is legal and the religion gives the power to abort any fetus before it processes. The different four schools of abortion in Sharia Law also defined in this research paper. The legal obstacles and legal rights of the fetus where it makes the conflicts with the human rights in the Sharia Law also discussed in this research paper. However, in the research paper the researcher has briefly analysed the importance, advantages and disadvantages of the Sharia Law. The researcher has also researched on the legislations of the Sharia Law on the human rights where the abortion has legalized in those Muslim countries.
During the eighties, women’s rights organisations mushroomed in the South Asia in response to varied manifestations of VAWG by the state apparatus and in the civil society in the form of anti-women family laws and customary laws, communal carnage, sexual harassment at workplace and assaults on individual women in the family and in the society. They organised rallies and demonstrations, sit-ins and conventions, seminars and conferences, which culminated into politics of protest movements and petitioning. In the 1990s, the women’s groups consolidated their base by finding their allies in the state apparatus and created their institutional base and shelter homes of women and children victims of violence. Now, it is accepted by all progressive forces that “Women’s rights are human rights”.
2006, Journal of Social History
Most scholars of the medieval family would agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Lawrence Stone has depicted married life in the Middle Ages as “brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating.” Judith Bennett also contends that wife-beating was “a normal part of marriage.” What is more, the rules of coverture rigidly enforced by the common law courts of England left a wife economically vulnerable. Because all real and movable property were thought to belong to the husband as head of the household, a wife who fell out of favour with her husband might well find herself expelled from the family home, without any resources to fall back on. At a time when families, not individuals, were generally responsible for spousal selection, it is not hard to imagine that many medieval wives found their fates difficult to accept. In general, historians have assumed that wives passively accepted this position – and yet, ecclesiastical and secular records for the English courts both abound with evidence of wives who deserted their husbands, refusing to adhere to unhappy or unsatisfying marriages. The goal of this paper is to examine this evidence, focusing on bishops’ registers, ecclesiastical actbooks, manorial courts, chancery records, and even assize rolls, to discern better the frequency and common features of wife desertion, as well as contemporary attitudes held by both wives and society in general.
2006, History Compass
When confronted with cases of self-killing, medieval jurors had to contend with a vast array of often conflicting concerns, from religious and folkloric condemnations of the act of suicide, to fears for the welfare of the family of the dead, and to coping with royal confiscations of a felon's goods. All of these factors had a profound impact on the verdicts put forward by members of the jury during the various stages of the legal process. While these elements form the base of jury verdicts relating to self-killings, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that medieval juries did not respond uniformly to cases of suicide. Rather, jurors at various stages of the process differed widely in their familiarity with the dead and this familiarity had an impact on their judgments. Members of the coroners’ inquest juries were often neighbors of the dead, and thus their verdicts reflected a more local resolution to the death of a community member than the verdicts of presentment or trial juries.
2008
This essay examines the genesis and continuing influence of certain core narratives in the history of western women’s healthcare. Some derive from first-wave feminism’s search for models of female medical practice, an agenda that paid little attention to historical context. Second-wave feminism, identifying a rift between pre-modern and modern times in terms of women’s medical practices, saw the pre-modern European female healer as an exceptionally knowledgeable empiricist, uniquely responsible for women’s healthcare and (particularly because of her knowledge of mechanisms to limit fertility) a victim of male persecution. Aspects of this second narrative continue subtly to affect scholarly discourse and research agendas on the history of healthcare both by and for women. This essay argues that, by seeing medical knowledge as a cultural product—something that is not static but continually re-created and sometimes contested—we can create an epistemology of how such knowledge is gendered in its genesis, dissemination and implementation. Non-western narratives drawn from history and medical anthropology are employed to show both the larger impact of the western feminist narratives and ways to reframe them. In 2016, this essay was selected as one of twelve essays reflecting the best work in the fields of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology published in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015. As of 2019, it, along with the others, has been translated into Chinese as part of a reciprocal arrangement to share the best work in these fields between China and the Anglophone world. For more details of the Reader Project in the History of Science, see: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/content/reader-project-history-science; and Angela N. H. Creager and Dagmar Schäfer, eds., History of Science in a World of Readers: Frames of References for Global Exchange, Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge Studies, 11 (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2019).
2016, Reproductive Justice and Children of War
This paper argues for abortion as a fundamental human right and necessary means of transitional justice for women and girls who are raped, especially during wartime. It also dives into the lives of babies and children who are born from rape, and what happens to them.
2003, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law
Early medieval priestly campaigns against contraceptive magic and medicine, in theology and penitential books. "Diabolical drinks" and ligatura (magical knotting) for contraception, and also, the magic of male impotence. The imperative to punish "simulated virgins" while ignoring endemic rape of bondmaids by masters.
2010
Scholarly work on all aspects of women, gender, and medicine has exploded in the past 30 years, largely due to the influences of women's and gender studies. Texts on women's medicine, in Latin as well as the medieval vernaculars, have been edited, and new discoveries have been made about women as medical practitioners as well as the care women received as patients. This bibliography comprises all the entries that appeared in the bibliography on “Women and Medicine” that I published periodically in the Medieval Feminist Forum (formerly, Medieval Feminist Newsletter) from 1990 to 2004. The previously published entries have been merged into a single alphabetical list by author, and some editorial commentary has been updated or modified. I have added items that were previously overlooked or that date before the original dates covered, and I have added new material published up through 2009, including a few items that cross over into the early modern period since they carry forward issues that began in the late Middle Ages. At the end, I have added a summary listing of all those works that include edited primary sources (noting English translations where they are included); these will be especially useful for teaching purposes. This bibliography is intended for free use, but please note that the editorial commentary should be properly credited if cited elsewhere.
This special issue focuses on the crime of infanticide in three of the four constituent nations of the British Isles: England, Scotland and Ireland. The papers collectively point to the fact that although families and communities could be a source of support for women in crisis, they were also the route by which many instances of infanticide were revealed. In addition, the evidence here suggests that the significance of religious cohe-siveness to family and community relations may, in some contexts, have encouraged infanticide to occur, due to a pressure to maintain respectability in religiously observant communities. The fact that the crime occurred regardless of the moral climate in each nation suggests that women faced with the reality of bearing a bastard weighed it against the possible consequences of committing infanticide and decided to take the risk. Thus the role of religious belief in the actions of married and unmarried infanticidal women emerges as a unifying contextual theme that is likely to stimulate further research. Social historians of the pre-modern period have tended to offer descriptions of home and family life as being close-knit and affectionate, where families regularly worked together for the benefit of the community in which they lived. Social commentators, religious correspondents and secular authorities alike regarded the family as an essential unit which provided a foundation for the development of morals, manners, and general civility in communities which needed to become socially stable in order to facilitate economic, political and cultural growth. Yet, this notional idyllic picture of how the family should be was often shattered by the reality of domestic relations in Britain throughout the i8th and icjth centuries. Indeed, until the advent of increasingly stringent legal protections for women and children instituted during the zoth century, violence within the family too often tended to escape serious legal sanction (Martin 1978). But although wife battering and child abuse were relatively slow to attract public interest, one form of violence, 'rooted in indifference to infants' (Hoffer and Hull 1984: ix), has long exercised the attention of lawmakers: infanticide, or newborn child murder. This special issue of a journal which addresses family and community history is devoted to a consideration of the circumstances in which this type of crime occurred; when family and community relations could be utterly divided." Violent crimes against children take place mainly within the domestic sphere, the perpetrators most often being a family member, frequently one of the parents. But
From Review: This resource is helpful for sexuality rights advocates, those seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the status of women under Islamic law, and women's rights advocates working in Islamic countries, or countries with deeply traditional cultural contexts that differ significantly from Western (and modern) articulations of human rights. With its comprehensive comparison of laws and practice, it is a useful resource for comparative analysis, and to equip women's rights activists with facts.
M.Div paper presentation
2018, Papers and Proceedings of the Third Medieval Workshop in Rijeka, Rijeka: Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Rijeci
2019, Chapter 7 in Miller, A.M. and Roseman, M.J. (eds) "Beyond Virtue and Vice: Rethinking Human Rights and Criminal Law" University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia: 2019
Whether being cast as an instrument of women's liberation, or as collusion in their own oppression, the mini-skirt has courted controversy throughout the world and for many decades now. But across much of sub-Saharan Africa, women accused of wearing mini-skirts that are "too short", have been violently assaulted by groups of men with a frequency and a level of violence that is particularly striking. Through analysis of two such incidents in Zimbabwe, first in 1992 and then in 2014, it is possible to identify key factors that framed these incidents, and re-shaped their legacies in striking contrast to each other. The basic premise of these incidents remains the same, with competing claims to law featuring prominently on both sides of the conflict: the men assaulting the women expect the criminal law to restrain such flagrant displays of women's sexual agency (as the men see themselves as stepping in where the law has failed to do so). The mens' calls are consistently countered by women's public mobilisation, and their protests invariably demand that the law protect them from criminal assault and sexual harassment, as they assert their "right" to dress as they choose. In 1992, the men's narrative was undoubtedly in the ascendant, effectively marginalising any other voices, but by 2014 developments in social media and clear manifestations of women's public empowerment, meant that narratives of equality and justice swiftly came to prevail. Analysis of these and other similar incidents, highlights how the already-extraordinary symbolic reach of the mini-skirt has come to be even more invested in the post-colonial context of Zimbabwe. As a constructed mediation of the self and society, the mini-skirt also bridges the personal and political wherever it appears, and in doing so, it inevitably brings to the fore many of the conflicts around "tradition", reproductive relations and sexual autonomy that frame gender relations anywhere, but have been further fuelled by the historical dynamics specific to Zimbabwe. Here, legal and racial subjectivities have been hostage to the power and politics of colonial subjugation and settler privilege, only to be subsequently instrumentalised further as part of the revisionist historiography designed to sustain specific concepts of "national identity" in service of a very narrowly defined "national interest".
The purpose of the research is to demonstrate how the practice of abortion in India involves state intervention in women’s personal lives. I demonstrate how significant contradictions arise in state practice towards women’s access to abortion. I discuss the implications of these contradictions for women. Moreover the sensitive issue of female feticide, which is the product of gender inequality, has been highlighted to show how this practice is culturally embedded and are generated indirectly by some of the state policies. This research shows how abortions in India are often a breach of reproductive rights of women, and merely serve as a tool to address the concern about population explosion. Moreover the state has imposed the 1994 Pre Conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act to prohibit sex selective abortions from above, without bringing changes from below, which is making the law stringent implications ineffective.
2009
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Interdisciplinary views on abortion: essays from philosophical, sociological, anthropological, political, health and other perspectives/edited by Susan A. Martinelli-Fernandez, Lori Baker-Sperry and Heather ...
A study of the intergenerational transmission of culture is presented here in its original form, completed in 2011, a manuscript that was never published, with the author as copyright holder. An abridged and updated version was published in 2014 by the Mellen Press, and is currently available in print. It discusses, in various theoretical contexts, 100 mother-son pairs, or dyads. But the original 2011 version is more comprehensive, discussing 325 mother-son dyads (for whom see statistical summary in the Appendix). It is given here in its entirety, in two formats, for the interest of scholars. First, the original chapters are given individually; secondly, a scan of the entire unpublished work is provided.
In proportion to the increased emphasis placed on abortion in partisan political debate since the early 2000s, there has been a noticeable upsurge in cultural representations of abortion. This article charts ways in which that increase manifests in contemporary survival-horror. This article contends that numerous contemporary survival-horror films foreground pregnancy. These representations of gravidity reify the pressures that moralistic, partisan political campaigning places on individuals who consider terminating a pregnancy. These films contribute to public discourse by engaging with abortion as an individual, emotional matter, rather than treating abortion as a matter of political principle or a political "means to an end." This article not only charts a relationship between popular culture and its surrounding political context, but also posits that survival horror - a genre that has been disparaged by critics and largely ignored by scholars - makes an important contribution to sexual-political discourse. These films use horror to articulate the things we cannot say about abortion.
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