This paper examines a 1998 patent for a “Positive fertility testing and reproductive health system,” which consists of what is essentially a handheld microscope for women and men to examine small samples of their bodily fluids to determine fertility. This patent describes a reproductive technology that encourages the user to engage in making observations, collecting data, and interpreting data about their bodies to make decisions about reproduction. This patent draws on the rhetoric of the women’s health movement of the 1970s to frame this technology, and the personal scientific practice that it encourages, as liberatory. 

Contraceptive technologies, particularly those that rely on monitoring or calculating methods, embody an essential tension between the standardizing impulse of modern medicine and, personal knowledge women have used to control their own fertility. As with prior contraceptive technologies, the rhetoric of the patent adopts Western imperialist anxieties over global population control and relies on perceptions of “natural” methodologies of contraception as inherently moral to sell this modern medical technology to world governments. 

This paper uses this patent as a case study in the complex history of contraceptives as it relates to the medicalization of women’s bodies. The positive fertility testing patent is one example of the ways that contraceptive technologies are much more than simply liberatory medical innovations. These technologies are designed to operate on multiple scales that encompass both medical imperialism through the export of tools for Western scientific vision and social movements for women’s liberation through the production of knowledge about their bodies. 

 

Midwifery provides a critical lens into the influence of women serving in medical capacities in early modern Europe, but this unique position has not been sufficiently explored with regard to Jewish communities. This paper examines the Yiddish translation of a Dutch treatise on reproduction and childbirth as a way to investigate the circulation of medical knowledge among early modern Jewish midwives. Commissioned in 1709 by an Amsterdam Jewish midwife, the resultant manuscript bears the name of the midwife alongside her translator, highlighting the crucial role of translators in communicating medical knowledge to Jewish women. I argue that by transmitting one culture to another, translators emerged as pivotal figures who could decide how information was phrased and packaged, and could fundamentally alter concepts in the books that they were supposed to “simply” translate. Especially with regard to Jewish women, who often could not read the local vernacular, translation into Yiddish became an important vehicle for accessing midwifery handbooks. In the present case, the Yiddish translation differs from the original Dutch work in numerous ways, suggesting the translator’s decisive choices about what to preserve or alter. Furthermore, an investigation of the sources of authority in these works allows us to establish some of the medical influences of early modern Jewish midwives. I thus provide a starting point for considering Jewish midwives within an international system of medical and scientific communication, whose content flowed between vernacular and elite practitioners in a way that makes clear boundaries or hierarchies difficult to delineate.

This presentation examines the effects of the contraceptive technology known as the Ogino-Knaus or rhythm method on the debate about contraceptives and law in early twentieth-century America. In 1924, the Japanese gynecologist Kyusaku Ogino presented his theory on the timing of ovulation. This was immediately applied as the Ogino-Knaus/rhythm method of contraception, in which knowledge of the time of ovulation is supposed to enable avoidance of conception through abstinence. In a sense, women’s calendars were redefined as contraceptives. As the pope was deemed to have allowed use of the method, Catholics quickly welcomed it. The American Catholic doctor Leo Latz published a book on Ogino’s theory and introduced a contraceptive calendar. Latz’s calendars were then circulated, effectively sidestepping the Comstock Act, which banned the distribution of contraceptives through the mail. Birth Control League of Massachusetts, which fought against the Comstock Act and the related Massachusetts state law, appeared embarrassed by the situation at first, but then they sought to turn it to their advantage. Thus, the Ogino-Knaus/rhythm method acted as a stepping stone to attacking the restrictive laws.

   Sally Shuttleworth, in The Mind of the Child, marks the publication of Darwin’s Origins of Species in 1859 as a point in which the view of children as those “on par with the animal kingdom” informs the psychological treatment and literary depictions of children.[1]  A shift occurs in theories of child development that previously analogue children to gardens to that of brutes and machines. Medical and religious discourse concerning the moral agency and status of the infant shifts as child-rearing and motherhood become more ‘scientific’ and specialized during the late nineteenth century and a sort of fragmentation of the infant, a separation of the physical, mental, and moral features of the child and discourse of the moral agency of infants wanes. With this project, I aim to uncover the moral imagination of infants in a period in pre-Darwinian America and consider its prevalence or dissolution in contemporary discourse on the moral agency and personhood of infants. Secondary to my project is the exploration of the various medical, philosophical, scientific and religious influences that molded particular conceptions of the infant as rational and moral. Untangling the interwoven threads of religious and philosophical discourse prior to the emergence of the evolutionary thought and scientific child psychology can shed light on alternative ways in which we might conceptualize infants as moral agents and address the problem of agency in general.

1.     Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature,
Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 181.