Advising Anne Boleyn in Post-Roe Oklahoma

I teach a course called “Women and Medicine” at the University of Oklahoma, a public university in one of the most conservative, heavily Republican states in the country. The course explores the intertwined histories of women as medical practitioners, patients, and objects of medical knowledge over the longue durée, including pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, and birth control. One of my most successful class exercises is called “Advising Anne Boleyn.” I ask my students to imagine that it is January 1533, and they are a group of women and men called to advise the new Queen of England, Anne Boleyn, on how to produce a male heir. To do this, I give them a selection of ancient, medieval and early modern texts on reproduction. The assignment exposes students to ways of thinking about sex and procreation that are unfamiliar, but it also encourages them to see the continuities between premodern understandings of reproduction and our own. In some ways, we have greater control over our reproductive lives than people in past centuries. Both childbirth and abortion are safer than they were in the past, and contraceptives are far more effective. But when it comes to problems like infertility and miscarriages, we have little more control than someone five centuries ago. And what has not changed in five hundred years is the tendency to blame women for infertility, miscarriage, and poor pregnancy outcomes. Anne Boleyn, beheaded after three miscarriages, forms a poignant counterpart to 21^st-century women like Marshae Jones of Alabama, charged with manslaughter after she was shot while five months pregnant; Brittney Poolaw of Oklahoma, convicted of manslaughter after she miscarried at fifteen weeks; and Brittany Watts of Ohio, charged with “abuse of a corpse” because she miscarried into a toilet.