Jodi Picoult

He told his medical students that Aristophanes mentioned pennyroyal tea as an abortifacient—just five grams of it could be toxic. That Pliny the Elder said if a woman didn’t want a pregnancy, she could step over a viper or ingest rue. Hippocrates suggested that a woman who wanted to miscarry jump and hit herself on the bottom with her heels until the embryo released and fell out; if that didn’t work, there was always a mixture of mouse dung, honey, Egyptian salt, resin, and wild colocynth that you could insert into the uterus. A Sanskrit manuscript from the eighth century recommended sitting over a pot of boiling water or steaming onions. Scribonis Largus, the court doctor for Emperor Claudius, had a recipe that included mandrake root, opium, Queen Anne’s lace, opopanax, and peppers. Tertullian, the Christian theologian, described instruments that match the ones used today for a D & E and said Hippocrates, Asclepiades, Erasistratus, Herophilus, and Soranus all employed them.

He showed a slide of a bas relief from the year 1150 decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where a woman in the underworld was getting an abortion at the hands of a demon.

It stood to reason that both life and death began with a spark of light.

the day I married Braden, if someone had told me that my prince would become a monster, I never would have believed it. I would have said no, that is not the direction in which the fairy tale goes. But there is a vast canyon

the day I married Braden, if someone had told me that my prince would become a monster, I never would have believed it. I would have said no, that is not the direction in which the fairy tale goes. But there is a vast canyon

I think about my history with Braden. Is what happened between us a secret, in the way that the nuclear codes are secret? Or is it private, in the way that—painful as the facts are—this is history that belongs to me, and is mine to reveal?

Something in me wants to tell these people, I am like Elizabeth. I am like Lily. I am like a lot of women in the world who choose to conceal something; who live in fear of what might happen, if the exact wrong person ever found out.