Articulating Life's Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Articulating Life’s Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century Lynda Koemm and Mary M. Lay Articulating Life’s Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century. By Nathan Stormer. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002; pp xi + 233. $70.00 cloth; $22.95 paper. Do women have a cultural duty to propagate? Is the body free from ideology at its time of birth, or are all bodies born into a cultural ideology that preexists the [End Page 250] individual body? According to Nathan Stormer, the seemingly contradictory assumptions that bodies are free of ideology at birth and that women have a reproductive cultural responsibility dominated early antiabortion discourse in the United States. Although individual and spatial rights of mother versus fetus are valid in any discussion of current abortion arguments, when identifying the origins of cultural influences or practices, finding the root is imperative. In Articulating Life's Memories, Stormer identifies the cultural nexus of antiabortion rhetoric in America. The questions that assisted his understanding of this nexus are "how knowledge of abortion was produced, how the space of its debate was formed, and the materiality of the bodies involved" (xii). Stormer's stated goal is "to understand better why we have an impasse" in the current abortion debate by learning the history of the rhetoric surrounding the debate (xi). He offers then a "not-so-humanistic" approach but looks instead at the rhetoric of practices rather than people (xii). After surveying hundreds of medical journals and texts from the nineteenth century, Stormer attempts what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls a "misreading"—a reading against conventions to discover "what other rhetorical work is being done that we are failing to notice" (xv; emphasis in original, xi). Stormer is interested in a rhetorical analysis of the texts and their performative aspects rather than in their persuasive function. He also makes his own political position clear in the beginning of his text: "I think the final outcome of a pregnancy belongs in the hands of potential mothers as embryos go about becoming" (3), a bold but necessary move for such an investigation. Stormer is successful in presenting a fair and thorough account of the early abortion debate, going beyond landmark works on this period by Leslie Reagan and James Mohr. Stormer offers a rhetorical analysis of the political, material, and spatial origins involved in the formation and maintenance of a cultural memory of antiabortion discourse. He identifies the genre in which he writes as a "feminist critical history of medical practice as rhetoric" (xiv). He covers not only the texts that directly inform his argument but also includes, for example, information on the culture of modesty that limited the physical examination of women, the entrance of women into the medical profession, the focus by physicians first on the uterus and then on the ovaries, and the attempt by physicians to curtail midwifery practice. He astutely weaves his many examples from medical professionals, politicians, and citizens so as to illuminate the spectrum of influences from which the current abortion debate has evolved, rather than relying solely on a preliminary literature review. Stormer's argument is sophisticated and ambitious as he eloquently marries medical texts and rhetorical theory to illustrate how medical discourses of the enlightenment, resulting from rituals of exposure, create and perpetuate antiabortion sentiment through the Neoplatonic processes of hypomnesis and anamnesis, resulting in a collective cultural memory. The eloquence of his style is exemplified by such statements as: "The moment the body gains a cultural purpose, it becomes rhetorical. When it gains a [End Page 251] destiny, it becomes a source of memory" (41). Stormer does not over-teach the rhetorical theory that provides a foundation for his analysis. He challenges the reader to learn the necessary rhetorical terms and tools but does so in clearly articulated statements, such as his definition of memory: "Treating truth-seeking as rhetorical, I consider memory as the capacity for a certain kind of epistemological work that etches the present in the likeness of experiences, places, events, things, and people of a refigured knowledge" (42). The reader then traces with Stormer the messages reflected in medical...