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.