Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940 by Karen Weingarten (review)

Abstract

ABORTION IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940. By Karen Weingarten. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2014.A solid work of American Studies scholarship should be truly interdisciplinary at same time it strives to challenge its audience to scrutinize a deeply ingrained ideology. Karen Weingarten's Abortion in American Imagination does this with verve. By drawing a trajectory from Anthony Comstock's attempts to regulate morality in late-nineteenth century, to popular fiction of early-twentieth century, to abortion's ties with economics and labor philosophy, Weingarten demonstrates that contemporary abortion discourse of and reveals that, despite crossing disciplines, issue has landed in nebulous realm of morality: [...] use of terms life and choice is caught in liberal American ideals of individuality, autonomy, and self-responsibility, which work to obscure abortion's entanglement in larger questions of race, eugenics, biopolitics, and, of course, gender (2-3). In order to disentangle rhetorical moves of contemporary abortion debate, we need to recognize that abortion discourse is bound up in a version of liberalism that, despite valuing the autonomous, self-reliant, individual citizen who singular rights must be protected above all (6), premises protection by state on only certain forms of life and only under certain conditions (7).To my mind, Weingarten's method of recognizing limitations of liberalism's relationship to reproductive rights is strongest feature of book. Throughout, she tracks instances of way abortion rhetoric is used to discipline women's bodies and how this alters and affects their participation in American life. Weingarten proves that white women were disciplined into viewing their bodies as national vessels for reproduction and believing that disrupting this process was against nation-state and their race (19). One solid piece of evidence to this effect is her reading of The Great Trunk Mystery from 1871, a dime novel that sensationalized story of a white girl found in a trunk on a Chicago train after she died from a botched abortion. The case, Weingarten argues, made explicit new collusion between those who explicitly care for biological needs and those who govern those bodies through forces of law (25), as well as exposing way antiabortion advocates used racial markers of usually foreign abortion doctors to emphasize threat to survival of white America. …