I listened to as much of the supreme court’s arguments on the future of Roe v. Wade as I could stomach last week—about five seconds. I’m raging at the ease with which politicians and the court are rushing to the unconstitutional act of forcing a pregnant person to have a child. The immorality of a country that could gleefully consider citizen arrests and lawsuits against someone at the most vulnerable time of their life—physically, mentally, economically—while at the same time celebrating a white seventeen-year-old child who crossed state lines to kill people who were protesting. It’s too much to fathom. I don’t want to try to make sense of it—that gives it far too much power frankly. My mind should not have to spend another minute on these white men and white women who so carelessly feel entitled to intrude and coerce women, trans people, and non-white women to have a child.
As difficult it is to be an individual woman or a person who doesn’t fit the white male hegemony we find our world ensconced in, it’s not about individuals, sadly. It’s about pregnant people as productive capital. And in times of economic crisis and demographic shifts—such as we are witnessing—control over a person’s capacity for reproduction is focused on as a source of new labor. If pregnant people produce more people, the population of a nation-state climbs—and there is strength in numbers, or so the thinking goes.
And thus, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about witches.
Silvia Federici, in her book Caliban and the Witch, writes about the control of women’s1 bodies in history and the institutions it serves—and of the context in which abortion was first criminalized—a time that coincides with the rise of the witch hunts. She writes
From the 1580s to the 1630s we see the onset of severe population decline. Markets shrink, trade stops; th is is the first international economic crisis. The new leaders of mercantile capitalism agree that the number of citizens determine a nation’s wealth. A fanatical desire to replenish the population—expressed by writers like Jean Bodin—is reflected in new policies. Infanticide becomes a capital offense. Pregnancies must be registered with the authorities. Marriage is encouraged, and illegitimacy is criminalized. … Midwives are enlisted as spies for the authorities, and doctors begin to replace them in the birthing room, as they are suspected of infanticide.
Crucial to this history is the timing of both reproductive control by the state and the criminalization of witchcraft: abortion was first called out as a criminal act in a 1484 Papal bull that denounced women for “hindering men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving” and having “slain infants yet in the mother’s womb.” It is at the same time—in an age of popular revolts, epidemics, and shifting economic architectures—from feudalism to capitalism—that witchcraft is also first declared a form of heresy: “the highest crime against God, Nature, and the State.” Between 1435-1487, twenty-eight treatises addressing witchcraft were written.
This shift in state (and church) coercion of women’s bodies occurred as other forms of bodily control and property ownership ran riot, with the colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples and their lands, the slave trade and slavery, indentured servitude, the clearances of Scotland, the enclosure of common lands in England, and the “bloody laws” against vagabonds and beggars. Six years before Columbus left Spain, the Malleus Maeficarum (The Hammer of the Witches) was published in 1486—a book which was republished fourteen times before 1521, and another fifteen times after 1576. Chapter VIII of the Malleus Maleficarum is entitled “How Witch Midwives commit most Horrid Crimes when they either Kill Children or Offer them to Devils in most Accursed Wise.”
The text is deeply misogynistic. Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature, notes how the feminine form Maleficarum, rather than the masculine form Maleficorum, was used in the title.
The enormous shifts from feudalism to capitalism in this same period of time—with the advent of science, the printing press, enclosure of common land, colonization—all of this led to new modes of structuring labor—life itself—around new social and political models. Federici writes:
the witch-hunt was part of the attempt by the emerging capitalist class to establish its control over the productive capacity of women, and first and foremost over their generative powers, in the context of a new sexual and international division of labor built upon the exploitation of women, the colonies, and nature.
The claims of witchcraft—by neighbor, by magistrate, by the church—was a neat container in which to fit all sorts of misogyny and control: of sexuality, of reproduction, of healing—the control of life and death that for so long belonged to the realm of women. Federici continues:
Witch hunting was also instrumental to the construction of a new patriarchal order where women’s bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources. This means that the witch hunters were less interested in the punishment of any specific transgressions than in the elimination of generalized forms of female behavior which they no longer tolerated and had to be made abominable in the eyes of the population…all these factors indicate that the target of the witch-hunt (as is often true with political repression in times of intense social change and conflict)—were not socially recognized crimes, but previously accepted practices and groups of individuals that had to be eradicated from the community, through terror and criminalization.
Women who aroused the suspicion of witchcraft were those who stood outside the lines drawn by patriarchy: the poor widow, the unmarried woman, a single woman who owns property, the woman who midwives.
The first book on midwifery written by a woman was published in the early modern era, overlapping in the latter era of witch hunts. Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book: or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered, published in 1671, was the first on the subject to be produced by an Englishwoman. At the time, only male physicians had ventured to write on obstetrics, arguing for the growing trend of dismissing midwives and employing only male midwives, as they were often referred to.
Jane Sharp was having none of it. She rather ingeniously wrote her book by citing earlier medical works written by men, lending support to her own experience and knowledge while correcting their misinformation. She offered extensive information on reproduction, wrote in the vernacular, and included herbal remedies for all sorts of issues of healing before and after childbirth. Sharp’s book was written by a woman for women—she wanted women to have access to knowledge in a time where the authority of men was increasingly intruding into the birthing room.
I love Sharp’s wit and description of this belief:
It is not hard words that perform the work, as if none understood the Art that cannot understand Greek. Words are but the shell, that we often break our Teeth with them to come at the kernel.
What also stands out in her work is how the religious, magical, and scientific coexist. Sharp believed in working with nature, rather than against—a flat refusal of the new scientific thinking of the time that believed nature unruly, feminine, and needing to be controlled. Sharp wrote:
…A Physician is but a helper to nature, and if he observe not nature’s rules he will sooner kill than cure.
Her book also centers and advocates for the health of women—including treatments for abortion.
The Texas law that the supreme court recently allowed stand—makes abortion a criminal act after six weeks. But regulation will not be done by the police, but by citizens. By neighbor. Just as the witch-hunt sowed fear among a population and turned to neighbors accusing neighbors, the Texas law deputizes all citizens to point fingers and name—accuse—those who assist, provide, seek out, perform, or support an abortion.
The similarities with witchcraft are rather striking in how spacious one label, one law can be to contain so many possible actions. A woman could be accused of witchcraft for healing, for assisting with a miscarriage, for begging, for being poor, for being old, for owning property in a time women were not allowed to—and in a time where property ownership was important capital that others would want to gain. Under the Texas law, how many people will be accused by jealous or abusive partners, by disgruntled in-laws, for assisting a sister who was assaulted and needs an abortion—as well as doctors who cannot provide care for people whose pregnancy goes wrong until it is life threatening? People could be accused simply for inquiring about abortion—for what is perceived to be related to facilitating an abortion—and for all manner of other ridiculous scenarios that frankly I again don’t want to spend time trying to fathom.
Quite simply, it makes anyone assisting, providing, or supporting an abortion into a witch-hunt.
What ended the witch-hunt wasn’t enlightened thinking—as we so often believe civic society simply progresses towards; it was simply the annihilation of a world where ‘witches’ existed. Carolyn Merchant, in her book The Death of Nature cites this as the move away from nature as nurturer, towards a scientific understanding that calls for nature to be controlled. As Federici writes:
With the persecution of the folk healer, women were expropriated from a patrimony of empirical knowledge, regarding herbs and healing remedies, that they had accumulated and transmitted from generation to generation, its loss paving the way for a new form of enclosure. This was the rise of professional medicine, which erected in front of the “lower classes” a wall of unchallengeable scientific knowledge, unaffordable and alien, despite its curative pretenses.
In the wonderful book The Witch of Eye, Katheryn Nuernberger wrote a series of essays centered around the accounts of witches—the women who were accused and why—while threading in her own experiences of being a woman. In one essay she writes:
For years I thought I was just a dumb girl who didn’t get it—“it” being The Critique of Pure Reason, the collected poems of John Donne, the whistle from across the street, why a man would shout “bitch” from the window of his car into the ear of a passing stranger, the blood pouring down my legs as I clung to my seizing belly. How careful I once was to remain polite and respectful when the doctor answered my question about what he’d just asked a nurse to inject me with by muttering, “You read too much,” before he went back to yanking my placenta out by the umbilical cord. Even now it feels as perilous…to suggest the scientific method is just one more socially constructed epistemological system of communal faith in a particular kind of truth, no more valid than a spell.
Pregnancy presents an incredible risk to a person’s body. Far riskier than an abortion. And that’s only before birth—before the sleeplessness, the stress of not being sure what you’re doing is ever right, before the feeding of another body with your own. Of worry that you have to return to work far too soon, sooner than your body—let alone your child—is ready, the worry of whether or not your finances will be enough to support this new life. To try and scrabble together the support needed to manage and care for oneself and a new life. It’s all an incredibly surreal experience. The idea that it could be forced upon pregnant people by the state—is incredibly horrific.
The legal trickery of abortion laws—the Texas and Mississippi laws, but also the restrictions and punitive tactics to shame a pregnant person into carrying through a pregnancy—feels like we are returning to an era of inquisition. A condemnation that proclaims a pregnant person has no rights once a second heartbeat is detected within their body. The one eclipsing the other, where one has no further rights to the autonomy of their body. As Eleanor Penny so aptly says of the restrictions and criminalization of abortion
…it performs a neat triage of women into a) those accepting their role as procreator, carer, mother, or b) those who can summarily be burned….
Isobel Gowdie, a Scottish witch who was put on trial in 1662, was a flyter—a person who exchanged insults in verse—a popular and rather ancient form of storytelling that persisted into the 17th century. But rather suddenly flyting was, like the many other older traditions, now considered cursing—a malfeasance. Nuernberger writes
Isobel Gowdie, it seems, knew she was alive by how she was fighting. She cursed Harry Forbes, the man who first accused and then interrogated her, reciting three times the refrain: “He is lyeing in his bed and he is lyeing seik and sore, let him lye intill his bed, two monethis days more.” These confessions of maleficium, if they are evidence of anything, prove perhaps her real desire to give certain men what she thought they deserved.
So this is a call in my mind to look backward to look forward. To look at the stylized verses and spells of earlier times, the wisdom of the old, the poor, the exploited, the erased. We need their voices, adding to the chorus of our angry incantations that we will not allow the erosion of a pregnant person’s right to be.
the term Federici uses is woman, based on the experiences of women because trans visibility in historical accounting is rare. But the arguments made here are intended to be inclusive of all pregnant people and their rights.
It seems like all 500+ years of technology has done is made it more efficient for dudes to be absolutely evil to everyone else.
stunning indeed! I want to stress on the fact that TEXAS IN UNDENIABLE ,SAYS KEROUAC, not only for nature, music, and around.. even for being conservative, I SAY, a place where the witches are minds thinking differently, supporting individual freedom in the deep sense of the word, that is to say not the liberty to kill a group or one all of a sudden, usually for racial problems or for fighting the "diverse" , a person thinking differently!Texas is one the great stones breaking the path to a more balanced nation - in this case I' d like to focus on the psychological consequences any woman can suffer from abortion, nobody is supposed to judge..certainly I live in a CATHOLIC country, I 'm not catholic however, I feel to respect everyone and Be respected in my choices, the problem of abortion is the same in Italy, we are living a very difficult economical moment, covid has reinforced the dark side of this trend- Can a law prevent a woman to save her future for many aspects?yes, apparently but we have an imperfect law, anyway there is , it is hard however, women often refer to the so called "secret nurses" or private doctors to have an abortion..and many times things go wrong. Now we have a possibility, but a great part of doctors are against ..so what can a woman do? wandering for a hospital or hub where it is possible..THE PROBLEM IS
that a woman must have the right to decide if or not giving birth a baby, without being considered A WITCH OR CRIMINAL OR..WHORE..the path toward individual freedom and human rights is very long, women do know this -thanks Freya, always present upon the burning matters....hugs ALE