Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America(Gender and American Culture)

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Proving Pregnancy documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over that of local institutions. These transformations placed all women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in ways they had not been before. Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.

About the Author :
Felicity M. Turner is associate professor of history at Georgia Southern University.

Review :
"Proving Pregnancy tells the stories of the many women who were prosecuted for infanticide--sometimes wrongly, but sometimes rightly. Ultimately, Turner argues that, taken together, their stories challenge the prevailing narratives of property, particularly as it is understood in relation to the body."--Journal of American History "Turner's timely Proving Pregnancy reminds readers that women historically possessed sole medical expertise about--and access to--pregnant, postnatal, and fetal bodies. Although Turner's work is not a history of abortion, the themes . . . such as medical knowledge, race, gender, and law, have shaped how Americans understand this polarizing issue today."--Journal of the Civil War Era "Proving Pregnancy is a powerfully written piece of scholarship that puts its sources to excellent use. . . . The book proves itself to be of indispensable use to historians investigating the links between gender, race, and medicine."--Journal of African American History "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."--Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "A call for scholars to recognize knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth as akin to a form of property. . . . Proving Pregnancy challenges the progressive narrative of history, showing how as women and African Americans achieved some gains in rights, they sacrificed an important source of power they had once monopolized."--Black Perspectives "In this illuminating new book, Felicity Turner makes a vital contribution to the growing scholarship around women's reproductive health in the nineteenth century. . . . The rich and challenging stories she weaves using coroners' inquests make this a fascinating, though often heart-breaking, book to read."--Gender & History "This well-written history bears a meaningful resemblance to the post-Roe era. Anyone interested in the present-day devolution of women's bodily autonomy will learn how Americans once empowered women, not individually but as a group, to police one another. . . . [A] worthwhile read."--North Carolina Historical Review "Turner has uncovered an important and provocative set of sources and opened a path for further investigation of troubled births, in the past and present."--Nursing Clio