Don't Breed on Me: A Short History of Abortion

Humans have always loved to fuck!

Don’t Breed on Me: A Short History of Abortion is a defiant, funny, and unflinching dive into the millennia-long story of abortion—a practice as old as humanity and as contested as ever. From medieval Europe to Ming Dynasty China, from women enslaved in the American South to German nuns smuggling herbs, abortion has always been here. And so have the people who provided it.

Rooted in global history, folklore, and fierce scholarship, Quasebarth’s book is as joyful as it is furious. She opens with a bang and doesn’t let up, threading together ancient remedies (like crocodile dung pessaries), feminist saints, lost abortifacients, and the enduring power of reproductive autonomy. Want to meet a medieval Italian surgeon who secretly performed abortions in a city that banned women from medicine? Or a Qing Dynasty widow who casually asks her lover for “red flower medicine” after a scandalous affair? Or a granny midwife dedicated to ensuring reproductive control for herself and her community? They’re here, and so are dozens of stories like them—buried, distorted, or erased by colonialism and patriarchy.

Don’t Breed on Me is not just a book about abortion—it’s a call to remember, reclaim, and reframe. For students, activists, and anyone with a uterus (or who knows someone with one), this book is both an accessible introduction and a vital tool in the fight for reproductive justice. Abortion is care. Abortion is power. Abortion is joy.

Praise

“In this fascinating and accessible volume, Quasebarth explores abortion around the world, from 1550 BCE to the present day.”
—Ms. Magazine

“From ancient Cambodia to contemporary New York City, Don’t Breed on Me relates stories, legends, and rumors about abortion within historical configurations of power and social constellations of significance. Joyful and defiant in turn, Madeline Quasebarth illuminates just how abortion is not a secondary consequence of power and significance but is a central and defining principle for life, and how we want to live it. In the end, Quasebarth suggests the essential truth of abortion is not its changing meanings as a medical or moral discourse, but its necessary resilience as a crucial practice of care. Don’t Breed on Me is a welcome reminder that abortion is here to stay, and we should embrace it.”
—Mimi Thi Nyguen, author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, & Other Refugee Passages

“In Don’t Breed on Me, Quasebarth takes us on a journey from Chaucer’s medieval tales to China during the Qing and Ming dynasties to the US during slavery (and further across the world!) to show how abortion has existed since time immemorial and always will. This short book is a well-researched introduction to abortion stories and the many lives they’ve touched. Even people familiar with the global histories of abortion will find something new and surprising in this wonderful little book. Quasebarth has woven a tapestry of abortion stories across space and time, and she leaves almost no corner of the world untouched.”
—Karen Weingarten, author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940

“In a world where the right to abortion is increasingly under threat, Don't Breed on Me offers a powerful message of hope: Across time and around the globe, people have supported each other, shared knowledge, and resisted oppression in order to provide and access abortion. Through these stories, the reader feels reproductive joy—the life-affirming joy of resilience, strength, and agency in navigating reproduction that has been passed on to us through the ages, and that we steward for those who come after us. This book is for anyone who knows someone with a uterus.”
—Simon Knaphus, author of Seahorses: Trans, Nonbinary, and Gender-Expansive Pregnancy

"An argument for abortion that concerns itself not only with the struggle we are in today, but also the rich history and vital future of reproductive justice for all bodies. Quasebarth is an important voice in the chorus that urges us on in this fight."
—Meg Elison, author of The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

“Don’t Breed on Me is absolutely fascinating and could not come at a more necessary time. Despite being both a basic medical procedure and incredibly common human experience, abortion is still contested, becoming harder to access every single month. And yet abortion has been practiced for millennia, as Quasebarth documents in this fascinating and richly illustrated book. She goes back through documented history, pulling forth ancient references to abortion and abortifacients, normalizing the procedure and situating it in its rightful place as an integral component of reproductive healthcare. Quasebarth seamlessly moves through time and across the globe, building on sources from the literature of the Ming Dynasty, to the Ebers Papyrus, to legal records from pre-revolutionary Mexico, and in the process she returns this deliberately obscured aspect of healthcare to us through the lived reality of midwives, doctors, and pregnant people through history. I hope Don’t Breed on Me opens the research floodgates on this topic, and I’m so grateful to Quasebarth for writing this book!”
—Matilda Bickers, author of Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex

“Both entertaining and informative, Don’t Breed on Me is a paradigm shifting book that provides historical and international context about the ways that different cultures have legislated and moralized around abortion. Through narratives that span history and the globe, Quasebarth shows us that abortion has always existed and will always exist, whether the state wants it to or not. It is a love letter to bodily autonomy and an urgent reminder that the place of abortion in any society is directly related to the way it views women and other marginalized genders.”
—Katie Tastrom, author of A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice

About the Author

Madeline Quasebarth is a dedicated public health professional with extensive expertise in sexual and reproductive healthcare, reproductive rights, and maternal and fetal health care access. She holds a master’s in health sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s in the social sciences from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate in public health at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

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