Abortion and Contraception in Modern Greece, 1830-1967: Medicine, Sexuality and Popular Culture

by Violetta Hionidou

Overview

The book examines the history of abortion and contraception in Modern Greece from the time of its creation in the 1830s to 1967, soon after the Pill became available. It situates the history of abortion and contraception within the historiography of the fertility decline and the question of whether the decline was due to adjustment to changing social conditions or innovation of contraceptive methods. The study reveals that all methods had been in use for other purposes before they were employed as contraceptives. For example, Greek women were employing emmenagogues well before fertility was controlled; they did so in order to ‘put themselves right’ and to enhance their fertility. When they needed to control their fertility, they employed abortifacients, some of which were also emmenagogues, while others had been used as expellants in earlier times. Curettage was also employed since the late nineteenth century as a cure for sterility; once couples desired to control their fertility curettage was employed to procure abortion. Thus couples did not need to innovate but rather had to repurpose old methods and materials to new birth control methods. Furthermore, the role of physicians was found to have been central in advising and encouraging the use of birth control for ‘health’ reasons, thus facilitating and speeding fertility decline in Greece. All this occurred against the backdrop of a state and a church that were at times neutral and at other times disapproving of fertility control.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030414894
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	05/15/2020
Series:	Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
Edition description:	2020
Pages:	361
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Violetta Hionidou is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Newcastle University, UK. She has taught at Southampton University, UK, Crete University, Greece and has recently held the visiting Research Fellowship at the Seeger Centre for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, USA. She is the author of Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944 and co-winner of the 2007 Edmund Keeley Book Prize. She has received funding from the European Union, the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy, ESRC and the Nuffield Foundation.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction.- 2 Fertility Trends, 1870-1967.- 3 Involuntary Childlessness.- 4 Self Help: Emmenagogues and Abortifacients.- 5 The Physician's Method: Curettage.- 6 Abortion: Law and (Dis)Order, Physicians and Midwives.- 7 The Ethics of Abortion: Poverty and Stigma.- 8 Contraception and its Methods I: Natural Methods.- 9 Contraception and its Methods II: Appliances and the Pill.- 10 Physicians and their Role: 'Medicine is an Art Form'.- 11 Conclusions.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Hionidou’s meticulous historical study shows in exemplary fashion how political and economic change can influence attitudes toward contraception and abortion. She persuasively demonstrates how and why one ostensibly pronatalist country could increasingly accept them – even on the part of medical and religious personnel, who often both privately supported and personally practiced their use in defiance of religious and professional dogma and of official policy. This book will find readers and imitators far beyond Greece’s borders.” (Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University, USA)

“For decades scholars have produced fine studies of fertility and contraception in modern societies that rely on at most one or two disciplinary perspectives. The limitations of this approach are self-evident: understanding fertility requires precise measurement and an understanding of the way ideas about fertility interacted with medical knowledge, religious notions, and state policy. Violetta Hionidou’s Abortion and Contraception in Modern Greece, in contrast, is multi-disciplinary study of fertility and its control in modern Greece. Drawing masterfully on the techniques of the demographer, the ethnographer, and the medical and social historian, she has produced both a much-needed, comprehensive account of fertility in modern Greece, she has provided a model for all others to emulate. This work is a triumph of truly inter-disciplinary scholarship.” (Timothy W. Guinnane, Philip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economic History, Yale University, USA)

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Alain Touwaide, PhD (Ronin Institute)
Description: The title only hints at the content of this book. It certainly is about abortion and contraception in Greece over almost 150 years. And, of course, it is about "medicine, sexuality, and popular culture" as the subtitle adds. However, the book goes further than that - it is a It is a multi-spectrum analysis that approaches the topic identified by the title from multiple angles, including demography, andrology, herbal medicine and practices, surgery, ethics, and religion, and the Pill.
Purpose: In the field of fertility decline studies (developed from the 1960s on), Greece was an exception, characterized by a different (later) timing than other countries. This book aims to reexamine this apparent exceptionalism. To do so, it provides the data that have never been introduced into the study of the Greek cases. Data have been collected from multiple sources, principally the personal [oral] histories of women and physicians, in addition to relevant scientific literature, official statistics, women's magazines, and the press. The author has amassed an unprecedented collection of primary data, which provide a solid foundation to her study.
Audience: The readership of this fine analysis will be as broad as its range of sources, from demographers to historians of medicine, including gynecologists and physicians, policy makers and also women. But it will also be of interest to students as a model of a cross-disciplinary study of a historical analysis of personal choices and practices.
Features: This 350+ page book systematically screens the process of fertility control (be it anticonceptional practices or abortion) from the raw demographic facts to the personal conviction and beliefs of the actors of the process (not only women, even though they are the major protagonists, but also physicians). Step by step, the author untangles the many components of pregnancy, from its impossibility (sterility, not only female but also male) to its rejection, including the undesirable pregnancy, and the social dimension of all such facts (particularly in a traditionally masculine society). The author delves a great deal into the abortifacient mechanism and substances (the emmenagogues), to further survey the structural/societal context of abortion, with the law, economics, personal ethics, and the church. She then moves to the practice and medicalization of abortion and contraception from the individual sexual life and regulation to surgical and medico-pharmaceutical practices.
Assessment: This is a masterpiece of fine analysis of a process all too often reduced to either charlatanism (the witches' herbs) or hyper-medicalization (the Pill). The author moves with great ability and sensitivity on a difficult, very personal field, avoiding both to protect herself behind dry statistics or to unmask and reveal the hidden life of women and men struggling with life (its making or its un-making). In a certain sense, this is a book about Greece entering the modern world, with the history of fertility control from the independence of the country and its official modern form, to the first studies of fertility. In this view, the book covers the transition of Greek society from a traditional mode to a medicalized society, with the consequences and modes of this transformation, including the control of fertility and the ways of doing it. It is thus much more than the history of fertility control; it is the analysis of a country that transitioned from a traditional way of life to the modern structure of societies, dominated by science and medicine, with the implications of this type of society. The control of fertility is, in a certain way, an observatory to approach the most recent evolution of a country.

Doody's Review Service

Abortion and Contraception in Modern Greece is a work of enormous breadth and depth that will reward anyone interested in the biopolitical technologies, knowledges, and practices that helped shape the specific history of Greece’s population since the establishment of the modern Greek state.” (Eugenia Georges, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 39 (2), October, 2021)

“This well-researched and erudite book is also a thoroughly engaging read. ... it will appeal to social, cultural and demographic historians as well as medical professionals. … By setting out such a well-rounded account of fertility decline and the evolution of birth control in Greece, Hionidou has thrown down a gauntlet to researchers elsewhere to broaden their perspectives and take a fresh look at fertility-related behaviour during their country’s first demographic transition.” (Eilidh Garrett, Continuity and Change, Vol. 36, 2021)

From the Publisher