Improving Upon Nature: The Rhetorical Ecology of Chemical Language, Reproductive Endocrinology, and the Medicalization of Infertility

Abstract

Chemical theories of human fertility and reproduction first became prevalent in both technical and mainstream media outlets beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, and they have remained prevalent to this day. In this essay, I analyze a selection of primary sources from this era that defined human fertility as a chemically induced process, rather than, for instance, a characteristic related to the conservation of nervous energy or to moral physiology. The resulting rhetorical history demonstrates the ways in which this chemical rhetoric was appropriated to re-envision sex, gender, and reproductive health in light of appeals to biochemical variability, artificiality, and technical expertise. Tracing these appeals sheds light on the rhetorical ecology that supported the widespread medicalization of (in)fertility and demonstrates how public vocabularies of science and medicine are constituted as they move across and interact with broader social discourses.