Woman Reading a Letter, by Johannes Vermeer, c. 1663. Rijksmuseum. Italians lived in some of the most medically sophisticated cities and states in early modern Europe, and were remarkably health literate. Abortion was a feature of the medical landscape. Healers at all levels of the medical establishment provided women and men with materials and services to terminate pregnancies and with health care afterward. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was becoming more contentious. Some theologians and moralists labeled practitioners who participated in abortions sinners and murderers. Theologically minded medical authors increasingly pronounced on the sinfulness of procured abortion, depicted it as contrary to medical ethics, and urged healers to abstain from its practice for both their own souls and the spiritual and physical well-being of their patients. While health boards did not unequivocally prohibit the medical practice of abortion, they increasingly tried to regulate it by means of legislation. Only physicians were officially permitted to induce abortions and only for reasons of medical necessity. All other healers who participated in abortions by selling drugs or letting blood from pregnant women without a physician’s prescription were threatened with fines and corporal or capital punishment should a woman die as a result of their interventions.