Published June 11, 2026
Reading Sarah Ruden’s Reproductive Wrongs, one might think that any ill that has befallen womankind since at least antiquity is due to either Christian or conservative men. Each chapter reflects this sentiment. Despite Ruden’s surveying a wide range of authors — from Ovid and Augustine to Charles Dickens and a modern-day abortion survivor — her work is not really a “history.” Reproductive Wrongs is a furious screed that gives the distinct impression of a toddler’s temper tantrum.
Ruden’s name may sound familiar to conservatives: She’s fairly well known in the world of classics, as she has translated a number of essential Greek and Roman works. She has also translated the Christian Gospels — though, because some of her interpretations of Scripture in this book are faulty (specifically, that of 2 Timothy 3:6), I’d approach her previous scriptural translations with care. By Ruden’s own account, Reproductive Wrongs was partially inspired by her experience of speaking at various churches or Christian institutions. She notes with surprise their willingness to debate many topics except the morality or legality of abortion. She attributes this, as she does almost everything in this book, to an obsession with political power and control over female bodies rather than, say, a conviction that dismembering a living member of the human species constitutes murder. History might be kinder to those of us who err on the side of caution, though perhaps not if Ruden is the one translating it.
If Ruden wants a productive conversation with pro-life Christians on the legal status of abortion in America, as she says at the outset of her book, she has a funny way of pursuing it. One can’t call Christianity a “sect,” the Bible “illogical, mean-spirited, and punishing,” conservative politicians “thoughtless brutes,” Saint Augustine “neurotic,” the apostle Paul a “thin-skinned martinet” and a “tiny-minded tyrant,” mothers “breeders,” motherhood a “legendary misery,” childbirth “expelling a fetus,” and Mary the mother of God “a widow in a rural backwater with her seven children” and expect to have such a conversation. Ruden, an expert in words, should be the first person to recognize this.
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Katelyn Walls Shelton is a Visiting Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Bioethics, Technology and Human Flourishing Program. She is a women’s health policy expert and, as a 2025-2026 recipient of the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship, is conducting a year-long research project on reproductive biotechnology and human nature.
