Violetta Hionidou, Abortion and Contraception in Modern Greece, 1830–1967: Medicine, Sexuality and Popular Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2020). Pages xix + 361 + b/w illustrations 2 + colour illustrations 11. £69.99 hardback, £49.99 paperback, £55.99 ebook.

Abstract

This well-researched and erudite book is also a thoroughly engaging read. As part of a series entitled Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History it will appeal to social, cultural and demographic historians as well as medical professionals. In recent years there has been a growing number of voices calling for the reassessment of our understanding of the fertility transition, citing a need for a greater understanding of fertility limitation and the attitudes of, and practices adopted by, individuals and couples who wanted to avoid conception. Hionidou’s work is an impressive response to this plea. Abortion and Contraception sets out with two main objectives: to re-evaluate the timing of the fertility transition in Greece and to understand the processes contributing to the decline in fertility. The first of these is dealt with in a single chapter considering Greek fertility trends between 1870 and 1967. Hionidou notes the debate over the Princeton European Fertility Project’s estimate that the county’s fertility transition had begun in the 1890s, before arguing persuasively that even as late as 1931 the country’s age-specific fertility curves were still characteristic of a natural fertility regime. Rates of fertility had been low over the previous three decades but this was ‘not because couples were intentionally controlling their fertility but because of the turbulent history of the country in those years and its effects on the lives of the population’ (p. 39). Couples had not been using parity-specific family limitation but, possibly unintentionally, had been spacing their children, creating a ‘natural’ fertility profile. The much more complex question of how Greek couples may have reduced their fertility takes up the remainder of the book. Hionidou pulls together cultural, medical, societal and economic factors to show that the use of ‘birth control’ evolved over a relatively long period, with changes in attitude and new innovations creating occasional, but not necessarily immediate, ‘step changes’ in practice. She takes pains to highlight the role of doctors in fertility control in Greece during her period, and is careful to describe how very similar practices can have very different meanings to different generations. Her arguments are enhanced by extracts drawn from two sets