Abortion: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

The proposed course, “Abortion: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” examines the question of abortion from a historical lens. The methods used are interdisciplinary and the geographical scope is global. The basic premise of the course is that abortion is a window into many of the big question in the humanities and social sciences. At a theoretical level, the course will propose that a group’s management of human pregnancy illuminates how it understands and therefore assigns value to the different components of pregnancy, specifically to pregnancy carriers (98% of which are women) and children (born or potentially born). This sociological observation will be a conceptual anchor of the course that I will not necessarily announce but hope that students will arrive at after 12 weeks of studying the question in different contexts and time periods through different sub-themes.