Pathology, Danger, and Power: Women's and Physicians' Views of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Weimar Germany

Abstract

This article shows how the very real risks of reproduction were culturally constituted by expectant mothers and physicians in Germany following the first World War. Both saw a strong potential for maternal and fetal death and injury. However, expectant mothers and physicians differed in the extent to which they regarded risk as contingent or inherent. Most physicians believed that pregnancy and childbirth first became dangerous in conjunction with a wide variety of other ailments, including complications specific to pregnancy. This view of pathology held a promise of prevention or at least treatment. Physicians further participated in inventing new, modern understandings of pathology, which also encompassed factory work as a reproductive hazard. Expectant mothers, in contrast, viewed pregnancy and childbirth as inherently dangerous based on their experiences and those of the women they knew, which not infrequently involved illness, disability, or close encounters with death. Many of them also held the ancient idea that a woman could harm the foetus with her imagination. As a result, though women varied in their beliefs (influenced by class, education, region, and religion), as a group they feared childbirth. Paradoxically, competition among lay and medical ideas gave women new options while also gradually enhancing medical authority.