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Author Biography

Manushag N. Powell is Professor of English and Secretary of Faculties at Purdue University. She is the author of Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals (2012), co-author of British Pirates in Print and Performance (with Fred Burwick, 2015), and co-editor of Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820 (with Jennie Batchelor, 2018). She edited the Broadview edition of Defoe’s Captain Singleton (2019), and has published widely on pirates and periodicalists, usually not at the same time.

Abstract

In most nations that still execute prisoners—including the U.S.—it is illegal to execute a pregnant person. In English common law, women have been permitted to “plead the belly” in one form or another since the 14th century, and this fact is sometimes misconstrued by anti-choice and forced-birth advocates as evidence of a long legal tradition of protection for the lives of fetuses. In fact, it is merely evidence of a long history of legal inconsistencies in the ways laws were applied and sentences carried out against women, for whom there were fewer options for clemency than for men. This brief discussion tries to introduce some nuance into historical understanding of pregnancy by looking into belly pleas; its chief case study is the infamous case of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who did actually plead the belly following being convicted for piracy, but whose actual pregnancies, I contend, have never been established.

Keywords

Anne Bonny, Mary Read, plead the belly, Matthew Hale, William Blackstone, pregnancy

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