ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with why and how women terminated pregnancies, how they described their condition and interacted with doctors and healers. It explains how men and women felt about the termination of pregnancies during this period and how pregnancies came to be policed in the public domain. The chapter draws on various cases involving charges of attempted abortion brought before southwest German courts between 1515 and 1690. For insights into married women's attitudes to fertility and its control, it presents a story of a village woman who claimed to have given birth to eight frogs in 1715. "Clogged", unmenstruated blood was understood to be impure, blocking the bodily functions and impeding the circulation of inner fluids; the "purging" remedies needed to restore the "flow" consisted of herbs that were also used to induce abortions. This overlap explains why knowledge about abortifacients could be transmitted quite openly in the early modern period and was shared by men and women.
