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Women's History Review
The many meanings of aborto: pregnancy termination and the instability of a medical category over time2020 •
This article received the best article in the social sciences prize from the Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section (2021), as well as Nursing Clio's annual article prize (2022). This article sheds light on an important facet of the history of abortion in Mexico: that is, moments in which doctors and priests reconciled the termination of pregnancy with religious ideologies, thus refracting the concept of abortion through a Catholic lens at different points in time. By underscoring ambivalences in the definition, implementation, and criminalization of abortive procedures, the research demonstrates that Mexican physicians periodically renamed or reconceptualized abortive procedures, thereby legitimizing them while constructing and reimagining the meaning of abortion itself. This allowed doctors to make fertility control compatible with religious ideologies and therefore legible to a range of spiritual and state authorities, but generally without overt challenges to Catholic claims about fetal life. The article argues that these historical cultures of Catholicized abortion— or, to use Morgan and Roberts’s term, ‘regime[s] of moral governance’—laid the historical groundwork for today’s chasm between practice and law.
Pregnancy and Reproduction in the Atlantic World—Oxford Bibliographies
Pregnancy and Reproduction in the Atlantic World2021 •
Until recently, monographs addressing reproduction were relatively rare in scholarship on the Atlantic world. Although studies of gender have proliferated over the last thirty years, the field still has no single body of literature on reproduction itself. Rather, there are multiple distinct—and sometimes overlapping—thematic fields and national or regionally based literatures. Within these, pregnancy has implicitly and explicitly intersected with questions of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, healthcare, mortality, religion, enslavement, and justice. Emergent literature has developed with particular vigor around themes of slavery and the slave trade, colonization and empire, and eugenics. This article approaches the Atlantic world as a global crossroads that is fundamentally interconnected with other world regions. This approach has led to an emphasis on the Americas, especially Latin America and the Caribbean, as they are regions profoundly influenced by empire and enslavement. There is a particular dearth in the historical scholarship on reproduction in Atlantic Africa, although this article includes a few histories of motherhood in East Africa; also although historical scholarship is lacking, there is a wealth of work on pregnancy and childbirth in contemporary Africa. Some of the most important thematic trajectories across these bodies of scholarship are demarcated here, with emphasis on breadth, methodological innovation, geographic coverage, and impact in the field. Also included is a sampling of classics and newer scholarship, with some reference to emerging scholarship as well. Whenever possible non-English language work is highlighted, as it is far too often marginalized and uncited. Monographs are prioritized whenever possible, and readers should note that many of the scholars cited below have a wealth of relevant articles in addition to their books. The collections are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather suggestive and generative. Following the first sub-section, which is on Primary Sources: Online Collections and Digital Databases, the subsections are organized alphabetically by subtitle. In 2018, Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell published an admirable and sweeping Cambridge history entitled Reproduction: From Antiquity to the Present Day. The volume includes forty-three chapters and has wide temporal and geographic scope. Although the Cambridge textbook includes the Atlantic world, the chapters are more globally oriented, and do not present an Atlantic view per se. In the works cited below, readers will see the arc of a particularly Atlantic story—one centering issues of justice, freedom, intimacy, and agency, as well as cultural negotiation, conflict, and change. These all manifest in the contexts of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the interconnected worlds of African, Indigenous, Asian, and settler-European communities in the Americas. Finally, a focus on women’s reproduction reifies the essentialized category of normative cis-gender maternity. This reflects a trend in the literature itself, which—with the work of Rachel Ginnis Fuchs on paternity being a notable exception—tends to pay more attention to women’s reproduction than to male contributions to reproduction and childrearing.
NAPW Working Paper
Birth Justice as Reproductive Justice - May 20122012 •
This working paper, originally developed in late 2009 and distributed in January of 2010 (and later expanded upon in 2012), articulated the connections between the concerns of people advocating for options and dignity in birth, and the Reproductive Justice movement. It posited that birth justice would be fully incorporated into reproductive justice "when the goals of reproductive justice fully address and incorporate not only women’s ability to make decisions about whether and when to have children, but also about how they are treated during the critical times of labor and childbirth."
During the pre-Columbian and colonial periods, Andean cosmological understandings shaped indigenous approaches to maternal health. Women typically gave birth at home with the assistance of a midwife (also called a partera or comadrona in Spanish). Birthing and post-partum care relied on local herbal remedies and followed specific social rituals. Women drank teas derived from anise or coca during the labor process, gave birth in a squatting position (toward Mother Earth, or Pachamama), and drank sheep soup after labor to replenish strength and warm the body. Rooms were kept dark because the common perception was that bright light injured newborn babies’ eyes. After labor, families buried or otherwise disposed of the placenta to keep the baby and mother healthy and facilitate lactation, as per Andean tradition. Changes in maternal health rituals began in the eighteenth century as colonial rule became more consolidated. The rise of a distinct medical profession and government interest in population growth gradually shifted responsibility for maternal health from the Catholic Church and charitable organizations to the state. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the state’s and the medical profession’s growing power and authority led doctors and urban-based reformers to attempt to change long-standing Andean birthing practices, which they considered unmodern and unsanitary. These reforms emerged from a desire to reduce infant mortality rates and replace traditional healers with medical professionals that were trained, licensed, and regulated by the state. As reformers looked to replace Andean maternal health and healing practices with new scientific understandings of the female body and birthing process, they also worked to discredit and displace midwives’ knowledge and practices. In particular, they encouraged women to give birth in newly constructed hospitals and seek the guidance of medical professionals, like obstetricians. However, these reforms met with limited success. In the Andes today, midwives still attend to roughly fifty percent of all births, and in some remote areas the figure is as high as ninety percent. It is also more common today to see the merging of biomedical and ritual practices to increase women’s access to and acceptance of health services and reduce overall mortality rates.
History of Health and Disease in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1600–1870
History of Health and Disease in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1600-18702022 •
Health and disease have long animated historical studies of Latin America and the Caribbean, predominantly through the lens of medical science, taken up in modern histories of the region through the politics of public health, the rise of biomedicine, and the professionalization of the medical discipline. This article approaches the history of disease through a broader understanding of health and healing that understands medicine to be fundamentally interconnected with religion, ritual practice, and extra-human relations with the natural world. The authors have chosen studies that trouble chronologies dividing Latin American history into colonial and modern eras. They instead highlight works that show how multiple cosmographies, epistemologies, and other ways of knowing with and beyond biomedicine continued to inform health practices well after independence and the rise of the nation-state. Some of the most important thematic trajectories across these bodies of scholarship are discussed, with emphasis on methodological innovation and impact in the field. Much of the scholarship highlighted here draws on archival sources related to the Inquisition, criminal and ecclesiastical courts, the transatlantic slave trade, municipal records, and correspondence sent and housed in Seville at the General Archive of the Indies (AGI). Included are a mix of canonical texts and newer pieces that have moved the field in exciting and innovative directions. The collections are not intended to be exhaustive but rather suggestive of distinct debates in the subfields we have chosen to highlight. Following the first three sections after the Introduction, which are on primary sources (online collections and published translations), digital research collections, and overviews, the sections are organized alphabetically by title. Cueto and Palmer 2015 (cited under Overviews of Health and Disease in Latin American History) is one of the only comprehensive English-language textbooks on health and disease in Latin American history, though it tends to favor the modern period. In addition, there are several useful overviews and collections that teach well in undergraduate and graduate coursework. The field of early modern Latin American history would greatly benefit from additional overviews and edited collections that take up the role of health and disease in the region, particularly as they intersect with questions of race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, religion, enslavement, and the law.
Women's History Review
'Performing Public Piety': Infanticide and Reproductive Agency in Reformation Spain2021 •
This article focuses on infanticide prosecution in sixteenth-century Spain, and the judicial fate of women suspected of violating both criminal law and Christian precepts in the era of Tridentine reform. Through court records from the Kingdom of Navarre (annexed by the Castilian crown in 1515), the author explores how women on trial for the suspicious death of their infants co-opted language of Christian maternity and Catholic sacramental morality to craft their defense against prosecutorial allegations of murder and sacrilege. The article argues that accused infanticidal mothers used performative public piety and doctrinal ambiguity surrounding the post-mortem fate of the unbaptized to their legal advantage, not only to plead their innocence but also to assert their reproductive agency before the early modern Spanish court.
SSRN Electronic Journal
With Liberty and Justice for All: Abortion, Religious Freedom and the Constitution2000 •
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics
‘Our Darkest Hour’: Women and Structural Violence under Ireland’s 8th AmendmentPregnant Woman and Unborn Child: Legal Adversaries
Pregnant Woman and Unborn Child: Legal Adversaries2002 •
Law and History Review
More than Mothers: Juries of Matrons and Pleas of the Belly in Medieval England2019 •
Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry
Lawful Sinners: Reproductive Governance and Moral Agency Around Abortion in Mexico2007 •
1994 •
2010 •
2016 •
Bailliere S Best Practice Research Clinical Obstetrics Gynaecology
Ethical challenges of treating the critically ill pregnant patient2008 •
2015 •
Journal of law and medicine
Crimes amendment (Zoe's law) Bill 2013 (No 2): paradoxical commercial impacts of the conservative agenda on fetal rights2014 •
2018 •
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
The Growth of Medical Authority: Technology and Morals in Turn-of-the-Century Obstetrics1987 •
Journal of Law and Medicine
The bereavement gap: Grief, human dignity and legal personhood in the debate over Zoe's Law2014 •
Konsthistorisk Tidskrift | Journal of Art History. Stockholm: Routledge
Frida Kahlo's Abortions: With Reflections from a Gender Perspective on Sexual Education in Mexico2006 •
Engaging Science, Technology, and Society
Good Mothering Before Birth: Measuring Attachment and Ultrasound as an Affective Technology