It is hard to describe abortion as a form of sexual freedom. Writing of art and abortion in 2009, when abortion was still legal across the country, Jennifer Doyle expressed this difficulty with eloque...

In Ancient Rome, male doctors were summoned during childbirth only if labor proved difficult. Instead, it was midwives who played the literal and figurative role of a physical and emotional support in...

Portuguese painter Paula Rego (1935–2022) is often called a remarkable storyteller, as her work is deeply ingrained with narrative. Her stories are sometimes personal, entangled with family and childhood memories, individual politics, experiences, feelings, and emotions. But…

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, access to reproductive care in the United States is under severe threat, with procedures once considered routine now illicit in many parts of the country. Equally disturbing is the…

In 1972, Susan Sontag identified the seduction of “fascinating fascism” in American culture. Here, I look to the allure of the image of the fetus as fascinating fetalism. While “fetalism” is a medical term describing the…

Madonna (1895/1902), one of Edvard Munch’s most famous and heavily reproduced works, depicts a nude woman surrounded by a distinctive red border with spermatozoa and a worried looking infant or fetus in the lower lefthand corner…

On May 2, 2022, a draft decision leaked from the US Supreme Court confirmed what many had feared: that the highest U.S. court was set to overturn the 1973 decision Roe v. Wade and roll back…

What can paint and marble tell us that trips to the archives might not? As a historian, I was prompted to ask questions such as this while reading these essays exploring representations of abortion in art…

I have been thinking a lot lately about what reproductive justice looks like, especially in this moment. I mean this question quite literally. What would our resistance look like if we thought more about aesthetics? What…

A poem of collective grief and protest by former Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye.