ABORTION IN THE COURTS AT THE END OF THE OLD REGIME. A CRIME OF DIFFICULT PROBANCE

The issue of abortion in the Old Regime has not been tackled from the point of view of social, demographic, or gender history, nor extensively from the History of Law, affecting, nevertheless, all these historiographical areas. For the study of abortion we have a varied literature of the time, in catechisms, manuals for confessors, works of moral theology and Canon Law. Notwithstanding, in this work we will examine it from the treatment it had in the court of the Royal Chancery of Valladolid, in the last decades of the seven hundred, through the analysis of the discourse embodied by the agents of justice in the processes.