While many of those civilizations did employ methods of birth control and abortion, that’s not true of the Persians. In fact, they were so firmly opposed to abortion that, if a woman was found to have procured one, she would be sentenced to death, as would her sexual partner and any midwife who helped her. If a woman miscarried for any reason, she was whipped four hundred times before being made to drink cow’s urine, to “wash over the grave in the womb.”
