Most of the stories people told about abortion in the Early Middle Ages are hidden. We have whispers of only a few like the unpleasant story with which Theutberga was slandered. In the eighth century, an author took it upon himself to retell the life of Germanus in an abridged form; the Vita Germani brevior runs to just a few pages. The author had abbreviated the life so that he could ‘now relate what the story teaches so truly’. The first lesson in this distilled life of Germanus nevertheless remained the saint's miraculous survival in the womb:

We have heard it all before. By this third telling, I can no longer surprise my reader. But one lesson which the story ‘teaches so truly’ is to resist the numbness of repetition. Reams of repetitive texts addressing abortion recirculated across the Early Middle Ages. As this book has traced, they were reread with new eyes, reinvigorated with new meanings and revised in what Regino of Prüm had called ‘these, our perilous times’.