>I just don't see it. Innocent doesn't say that witches
>are, say, "appealing to naive or sinful women to
>commit the blasphemy of killing their babies in the
>womb." He refers to them blasting said children in the
>womb in a hostile fashion, just like he accuses them
>of sicing spells on livestock and grown men and women.
>He's thinking of a group of people in a circle in the
>wood kissing the butt (literally) of the Black Man,
>saying moogly-moogly words to curse the local village
>and then flying off on their brooms.
So, clearly, none of this is a precise report of what was actually going on.
>That's quite far
>away from someone giving somebody else contraceptives.
>(Was contraception really so hard to get in this era?
>A condom is not exactly high-tech.)
Female-controlled contraception isn't exactly easy to get in the *current* era, especially if you are poor and live in a country without national health care. The most widely-used method in that era, coitus interruptus, requires m ale cooperation. (The condom, another method requiring male cooperation, doesn't really take off as a contraceptive method until the vulcanization of rubber in the late 19th C. Various kinds of sheaths have been used at earlier times, but as you can imagine they were leaky and unsatisfactory in other ways. They do go back to prehistoric times, though.) The pessaries, potions, and advice of midwives were probably the most effective second defense. Even knowing to withdraw (you know, Onan's sin) is a kind of information that would need to be passed down, and you're not going to get it from a church which condemns any kind of contraception as murder. "there are ... seven methods by which they infect with witchcraft the venereal act and the conception of the womb: First, by inclining the minds of men to inordinate passion; second, by obstructing their generative force .... fifth, by destroying the generative force in women; sixth by procuring abortion..." Seems pretty specific to me.
They could hardly say, well, these witches are helping women prevent unwanted pregnancies, so they need to be tortured and killed. How popular would that be? Instead everything that goes wrong is blamed on them (the death of your cow, the death of the neighbor's three-year old, the fact the crops aren't growing...) Although I have read quotes from English witch-hunters saying the worst problem is the blessing witches, especially (as opposed to the cursing witches).
No, they don't say that the women seeking to abort are the perpetrators, but that's quite common. For example, that's how anti-abortion laws were written in the U.S. when they were first written (in the mid-19th century). The practitioner is the criminal, the woman the victim.
Jenny Brown