This session examines reproductive health as a historical site of meaning-making, cultural anxieties, and contested medical and scientific authority. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reproduction gained new salience as an object of medical oversight and intervention. This attention frequently centered concerns over “defective” reproduction and infant mortality. Such concerns were embedded within complex discourses of race, gender, nationalism, and medical authority.
These presentations situate the aspirational management of reproductive health within specific social, political, and ideological contexts. First, Shannon Withycombe contextualizes the emergence of prenatal healthcare within early twentieth-century anxieties over immigration, race, and nationalism, showing how U.S. physicians articulated the necessity of prenatal care in terms of racial and national preservation. Next, Miriam Rich examines biomedical concepts of “monstrous” reproduction in the nineteenth-century U.S., exploring how physicians and scientists linked anomalous embryological development to claims about racial hierarchy and degeneration. Wangui Muigai then considers African American ideas and concerns about pregnancy and childbearing in the early twentieth century, situating these concerns within broader debates about racial fitness, reproduction, and maternal and infant health. Finally, Emily Harrison explores the twentieth-century use of infant mortality rates as a global metric of social health, analyzing shifting meanings and approaches in Ecuador, India, and the U.S. in the context of changing notions of medical authority, expertise, and communal health. By centering the cultural and political meanings of reproductive health, this panel builds on scholarship charting new interrelations in the histories of science, medicine, gender, and race.
