From the first page, it’s clear that Dr. Jessica Cox’s Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain is very personal. Professor Cox, a Reader in English Literature at Brunel University in London, explains that this project came out of her own pregnancy and childbirth experiences. She doesn’t just note this in the… Read more →
Tag: Pregnancy
(Still Being) Sent Away: Post-Roe Anti-Abortion Maternity Homes
In the years before Roe v. Wade, and in a context of severe stigma of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, maternity homes in the United States housed residents who, upon giving birth, often relinquished their children for adoption. One consequence of the legalization of abortion in 1973 was that fewer American women and girls were “sent away” to… Read more →
The Mifepristone Case Hinges on Whether or not Pregnancy Should be Considered an “Illness” – What Can We Learn When We Look for Medical Precedent?
In November 2022, a group of physicians filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) seeking to revoke their approval of mifepristone, one of the medications in the abortion regimen that accounts for more than half of abortions in the U.S. The plaintiffs argue that the FDA was remiss in approving the drug… Read more →
Trans Pregnancy and TikTok Activism: A Shifting Conversation
“Is society ready for this pregnant husband?” was the subheading of Thomas Beatie’s 2008 essay about his pregnancy. Mr. Beatie was considered the first pregnant trans man to come forward publicly; his story was hugely influential in terms of visibility but also the subject of hurtful jokes and discrimination (Barbara Walters, for example, referred to… Read more →
The Season of NICU
We spent all of winter in the NICU. When I was 25 weeks pregnant, I went into preterm labor and gave birth to my daughter. She weighed just one pound 13 ounces and was barely one foot long. Having a micropreemie in the NICU feels like an alternate reality. Time stops working the way one… Read more →
Pregnancy Test: An Interview with Karen Weingarten
Karen Weingarten is a regular contributor to Nursing Clio and Associate Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She has just published a new book titled Pregnancy Test and is the author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880- 1940. Lara: How did you get interested in researching the history and culture… Read more →
Making Maternal Labor Visible
Popular culture tells us many things about Americans. We watch stories of made-up families and binge shows that fictionalize real-life situations. We know that television shows do not depict the realities of our lives; onscreen, we see the best edits, the reflection of life with the challenges often glossed over or removed. Television shows have… Read more →
“Discharged Well”: or, How I Learned to Feel in the Archive
This story begins in the fall of 2007. I was on my first research trip to look through various records at the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard. I was a baby researcher, fresh from defending my prospectus and high with the achievement of receiving a research fellowship. But I was also severely insecure. As… Read more →
An Untold Story: Black Maternal Mortality in the United States
In April 2016, Kira Johnson, 39, and her husband were excited to bring their second child into the world. After delivering via C-section, her husband noticed something wrong. He alerted the medical staff that there was blood in Kira’s catheter. While the staff promised to immediately do blood work and order a CT scan, it… Read more →
Seeing Pregnant People: History, Empathy, and Reproductive Politics
On November 22, 1863, New Yorker Charles F. Robertson testified in a deposition that, “About two months ago [his wife Letitia] suspected that she was in the family way and seemed almost crazy at the idea, and commenced taking medicine to bring on an abortion. She took blood root, tanzy, &c., and on the night… Read more →