[gblockquote source=”Barbara Rhodes, PhD, September 1975″]“It is overdue for racism to be rousted from its seat of power and that […]
Constructing the Modern American Midwife: White Supremacy and White Feminism Collide
The year 2020 marks one of those global tipping points – time divided into pre-COVID and the promise of after […]
Creating Community and Finding Connection: A Black Nurse’s Experience in Vietnam, 1966–67
Nobody wanted Elizabeth Allen in Vietnam. From her master’s advisor who questioned why on earth she would want to enlist […]
Beyond Florence: Valuing Nurses in the History of Health Care
Before COVID-19 was even a blip on the horizon, the World Health Organization had declared 2020 the Year of the […]
“Blossoms of Hope”: Our Cultural History of Pregnancy and Infant Loss and Grief
By Ginny Engholm
In a recent Adventures in the Archives post, Adam Turner recounts a moving story of grief and loss he found in Today’s Health of a woman whose daughter was born three months premature due to a hemolytic disease in the 1950’s. In the comments section after the post, blogger Historiann remarks, “I find it fascinating that she writes of her RH baby as being born ‘just three months too soon,’ and very much as a daughter rather than as a fetus or a patient. Even now, a 3-months preemie is still an extremely premature child with no guarantees–it’s interesting to know that some woman in 1950 thought about her daughter in the ways that seem familiar to [how] those of us in the post-Roe, post-ultrasound era think about pregnancy & children.” The commentator’s surprise at this mother’s conception of her fetus as a “daughter,” I think, mirrors a current trend in the feminist scholarship of pregnancy and childbirth that seems to divide cultural ideas around pregnancy, fetuses, and infants into pre- and post-Roe. Furthermore, advances in prenatal technology, particularly the development and increasing use of ultrasound technology, encourage us to imagine that women today have different, and in some ways, more personal relationships with their children still in the womb. And no doubt we do.
