Reproductive Wrongs

Nadya Williams Reviews Sarah Ruden's Latest Book

Reproductive Wrongs

Nadya Williams

In 2025, the journalistic venture ProPublica won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The prize was awarded for “Life of the Mother,” a moving series of profiles about the “fatal consequences of abortion bans.” There was only one problem: none of the women profiled died because of the bans. In each case, the mother died because of medical malpractice that had nothing to do with the ban (as in the case of a happily pregnant woman who had gone septic) or as consequence of an abortion gone wrong. In other words, “pro-life laws didn’t kill these women.”

How could such a misleading series win such a prestigious journalism award? I pondered this question while reading Sarah Ruden’s latest book. A critically acclaimed translator of Greco-Roman Classics, Ruden has more recently turned to trying to pass off her personal opinions on gender as scholarship instead. In her 2025 biography of the early Christian martyr Perpetua, for instance, Ruden criticizes the martyr’s motives, contemptuously dismissing the very concept of martyrdom as nothing but abuse of gullible women without better options. In her new book, Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women, she treats her own opinions about family formation over the past two thousand years as incontrovertible truth.

Ruden exhibits an increasingly common blind spot among progressive academics: the inability to understand what makes women different from men and why that difference matters. Ruden, who does not appear have children herself and is depicted cuddling a dog in the author photo on the book’s back flap, seems to have a hatred of motherhood that borders on the pathological. To describe the book as a screed against motherhood might be an understatement. She appears incapable of considering that most women in history have actually wanted to be mothers—or even that in modern America, there is a significant fertility gap, as “women want more children than they’re having.”

Ruden doesn’t care. Rather, she would like you to know that over the past two thousand years, everyone with power (and plenty of people without much power too) has tried to control women’s bodies in various ways, denying them access to the one key freedom they all need and desperately want, even if not everyone says it out loud: abortion. The method changes, but the motive is the same. Whether it be the emperor Augustus forcing women to have more babies for Rome, or Augustine trying to make everyone chaste and harming women in the process, or Charles Dickens profiting off saccharine tales of longing for happy families and thereby misleading impoverished Victorians into having large families, or (Ruden’s main target throughout the book) modern Christians, who would like to reduce all women to reproductive servitude by denying them access to abortion, they’re all the same.

Ruden’s Story of the World

The book moves chronologically in a series of seven vignettes from the early Roman Empire to the present. From the start, things are already bad for women in the Greco-Roman world. But at least they could access abortions, even if they were sometimes deadly. Ancient abortion practices gave them a modicum of control over their own lives, even if those lives were still nasty, brutish, and short. But then the Christians arrived on the scene and made matters much, much worse for women, abusing them and imposing control over the minute details of their lives. Ruden writes:

The Pastoral Epistles are fascinating documents in that they lay out the basis for the loneliness, overwhelming responsibility, and self-loathing that in the Christian and Christian-shaped world made motherhood a legendary misery, and the relationships between mothers and children comparatively fraught. This is because Christian motherhood was designed not for the good of the mother, the family, or the clan, but to put women in their place and keep them there.

Ruden explains that the early church also proposed such petty controlling moves as banning them from attending public baths, keeping them isolated and smelly (since no private bathing methods were available in Roman homes). This rendered women utter pariahs in a society that expected cleanliness for propriety.

There’s just one problem with Ruden’s story: there is zero evidence of its veracity. Her historical narrative is all speculation, based on an extraordinarily slipshod reading of the New Testament and such early Christian writers as Tertullian, who actually wrote at length about pastoral care for women and the importance of providing for their well-being. Indeed, historian Kyle Harper has demonstrated a remarkable shift wrought by Christianity in the treatment of women in the Roman world. In his book, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, Harper uses ample primary sources to show the revolutionary care for the well-being of women that the church brought about by requiring the same standards of bodily holiness of both men and women.

Yet so determined is Ruden to shoehorn all evidence into a reductive, monocausal narrative that among her most villainous villains are modern abortion survivors—women whose crime is, apparently, not dying. Indeed, Ruben concludes the book with a scathing retelling of the story of Gianna Jessen, a woman with cerebral palsy who survived an attempted saline abortion in 1977. In a chapter titled “You Can Make This Stuff Up: Antiabortion Messaging in Wonderland,” Ruden casts doubt on the facts of Jessen’s story. Even if it is true, she concludes, Jessen’s story is ultimately yet another plot of the patriarchy to subdue women. To Ruden, “the abortion-survivor movement seems to represent something extreme, dire, and culminating in messaging about fertility. More than two thousand years ago, rhetoric began to foist on women the sole blame for choices about which they had virtually no choice,” she writes on the penultimate page of the book. She adds, “But antichoice messaging was to become even more ambitious as modern ideologies and their communications tools developed. The propaganda of totalitarianism, by definition, takes everything.”

As a classicist, Ruden should know that there was plenty of misogyny in antiquity, well before the advent of Christianity, as there has been in every period of world history. While some of the crimes against women revolved around “reproductive wrongs,” the wrongs in question were often rather different from those she decides to focus on.

What We Believe About the Female Body

Ruden concludes the book with this rallying cry: “We need to know what people are actually made to believe about the female body, and what those beliefs can incite them to do.” Well, at least we agree on something. Except, as in the rest of the book, Ruden is convinced that her narrative is the only one possible—and everyone who is “antichoice” is a totalitarian puppet, at best.

What might be a better story of “reproductive wrongs,” ones that have denied women the ability to be women, mothers, and persons, all at once? One recent tour-de-force is Body and Identity: Liquid Bodies and Empty Selves by Fairer Disputations Featured Author Angela Franks. In her intellectual history of theological ideas from antiquity to the present, Franks shows how people have thought about bodies—especially those of women—and she explores the difference Christianity made in elevating women. Many bad ideas about the body, Franks documents, have involved seeing the body as something blank, liquid, shifting, and open to making and remaking at will. No less important to this ideal is self-ownership—the modern axiom that one’s body and identity are intensely personal and individually defined. No universal telos—goal or transcendent meaning—is to be imputed to the body. The self is all there is.

Yet life in the real world repeatedly reminds us that people are not just discrete atoms, and this makes a difference. Thinking of persons as part of communities is not “totalitarianism,” as Ruden inexplicably asserts. We did not make ourselves, and we do not belong to ourselves alone. Indeed, in my own book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic, I directly challenge contemporary anti-motherhood discourse as not merely anti-woman, but also anti-person. Whenever we denigrate pregnancy and describe children and family as problems to eliminate, we express a lack of affirmation for ourselves too—for every person began life as a child, born of a mother.

Indeed, for all her talk of the “totalitarianism” of those who work to restrict abortion, Ruden seems unaware of what totalitarian regimes actually do. In her recent book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, Julia Ioffe tells the harrowing tale of what state-facilitated availability of abortions has done to generations of Russian women. Modern Russia is definitely not the sort of woman-empowering haven Ruden imagines a free-for-all of abortion access might be.

What people believe—and “are made to believe”—“about the female body” is exceedingly important. It always has been, because we all live our lives as bodies. This brings us back to questions of purpose. What are women for? What makes them different from men? Ruden can only give the dystopian answer, rooted wholly in women’s access to abortion—and anyone who opposes it is the enemy. “America has an antiabortion movement unlike any other in the world in scale, organization, intensity, and effectiveness,” she confidently observes. “The movement’s propaganda is particularly powerful, tantamount to the Inquisition’s in its ability to sic people on phantoms, to conjure out of nowhere grisly threats that latch onto the popular mind and empower rabid leaders.”

Civilizational Sadness

In making this argument, which her academic training in Greco-Roman classics does not, in fact, equip her to make, Ruden goes a galloping step further than typical pro-choice feminists. While the latter prioritize abortion access for women, they often describe abortion as lamentable, a necessary evil in the unjust world in which we live. Ruden departs from this script.

“We have out-of-control greed on a planet with shrinking resources, we have whopping fiscal, moral, and institutional deficits,” Ruden writes, “and there is a wild alacrity in some quarters in shunting women and their wombs into sole responsibility for the state of our society.” If Ruden took the time to engage with real pro-lifers, particularly pro-life feminists, she would discover that their advocacy is not motivated by a desire to blame women for the world’s problems. Rather, they view abortion as an act of violence against an innocent human being and so work to support pregnant women in difficult situations. But in Ruden’s telling, everyone who expresses a love for children and family is written off as “right-wing.” Who else, she seems to ask, would want children?

Tim Carney concludes his recent book, Family Unfriendly, by describing the “civilizational sadness” of societies that do not welcome children, which become defined by their sterility. Ruden’s writing exhibits this civilizational sadness. The opposite outlook is civilizational hope. Thankfully, such hope still animates many women (and men), inspiring them to welcome children. It is with this hope that mothers and fathers pursue the ordinary tasks of teaching little ones to tie their shoes, to make art and music, and to take delight in their young lives.

Like Ruden, we should all be appalled by “bad ideas about women.” But we should do much better in discerning what ideas are truly bad.