Karen Weingarten

Karen Weingarten

Contributor

Karen Weingarten is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Her first book, Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880- 1940, was published by Rutgers University Press. She is co-editor with Michele Friedner of a forthcoming special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “Disorienting Disability” (June 2019). She has also published articles on American literature and culture in Literature and Medicine, Hypatia, Feminist Formations, and Feminist Studies (among other places).

Adventures in the Archives

What to Expect When You’re Expecting in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.

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Type “pregnancy” into any internet search engine today, and you’ll literally get a billion results. This plethora of information at our fingertips feels quite modern, and yet it has a long history: American women have long turned to the printed word for advice about their reproductive bodies. In the nineteenth century, there were many competing… Read more →

History

Over-the-Counter Anxiety: Selling the Home Pregnancy Test

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Walk through the aisles of any American drugstore, and you’ll eventually encounter the home pregnancy test section. Because of the ease, convenience, and relative affordability of these tests, the majority of Americans now find out they’re pregnant in the privacy of their own bathrooms. The home pregnancy test is undoubtedly a success story. You can… Read more →

History, Reproductive Justice

The Eugenicists on Abortion

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Clarence Thomas recently issued a twenty-page opinion on the Supreme Court decision Box v. Planned Parenthood that went viral because he drew on Margaret Sanger, founder of the first birth control clinic in the U.S., and her connection to eugenics in order to argue that abortion is and historically has been a tool to control… Read more →