Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Felicity M. Turner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Felicity M. Turner Emily Raymond (bio) Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America. By Felicity M. Turner. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xi, 228. $99.00 cloth; $29.95 paper; $23.99 ebook) Debates on the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth—particularly in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade—may appear to be relatively novel topics of controversy. However, as Felicity M. Turner’s Proving Pregnancy demonstrates, such issues occupied American thought long before the twenty-first century. Citing changes in the adjudication of infanticide cases from the late-eighteenth to late-nineteenth centuries, the book delineates how white men gained medical and legal control over women’s bodies. Turner argues that by appropriating once-exclusively female knowledge of reproduction, male physicians exerted control over women’s bodies in a manner that constituted intellectual ownership. Infanticide cases provide a lens through which scholars can examine the production and dissemination of medical discourse, leading readers to wonder: Who owns knowledge about women’s bodies—the women who embody that knowledge, or the men who appropriate it? Answering this question requires scholars to “reframe traditional understandings of property,” recognizing that such understandings are inexorably shaped by concepts of gender and race (p. 159). The opening chapters document a gradual shift from women’s active participation in infanticide inquests to the prioritization of male “expert” testimony in shaping narratives of indictment or exoneration. As male doctors defined the parameters of medical knowledge and laid claim to specialist expertise in court, they simultaneously restricted use of that knowledge to a privileged group of “regular” physicians (p. 57). Chapters three and four explore the conflation of race and infanticide, explaining how understandings of race and motherhood shaped American responses to infanticide as a crime increasingly linked to “otherness” and uncivilized behavior [End Page 199] (p. 62). The final chapters explain how women continued to lose authority and bodily autonomy over the course of the nineteenth century. This was due in part to essentialist arguments that alleged women’s biological inferiority, and in part because women “willingly ceded” control of knowledge about their own bodies to male experts—an unintended consequence of women’s struggle to achieve civil and political equality (p. 159). Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources that include newspapers and medical texts in addition to inquest records and court cases, Turner demonstrates the complexities inherent in the formation of social and cultural ideals regarding race and gender in nineteenth-century America. The vignettes dispersed throughout the chapters provide a vivid illustration of lived experience in public and private spaces, offering a lens through which “nineteenth-century Americans understood and interpreted bodies” on both a local and national level (p. 13). Turner handles inherently disturbing subject material with sensitivity, providing historically relevant details of infanticide cases while acknowledging the devastating impact that these crimes had on individuals and communities alike. One of the book’s greatest strengths is its representation of traditionally marginalized groups. The transition from reliance on female knowledge to male expertise had particular significance for the bodies of Black women, especially as proprietary rights to formerly enslaved persons were rescinded in the aftermath of Reconstruction. By juxtaposing cases that illuminate the discrepancies between treatment of white and Black bodies, Turner’s monograph provides a corrective to a lack of scholarship on the experiences of people of color. Future scholars should explore the implications of these struggles for the codification of medical ethics in the twentieth century, especially in terms of racially-based experiments such as the Tuskegee syphilis study. Proving Pregnancy offers a valuable contribution to historians’ understanding of how modern concepts of identity and community are shaped by gender and sexuality, as well as how knowledge can constitute a form of ownership. Turner’s book is also a timely reminder [End Page 200] that deeply subjective experiences such as pregnancy and childbirth remain freighted with political and cultural significance—and in many cases are still subject to medicolegal knowledge that is defined and controlled by white males. Emily Raymond EMILY...