(Male) Medical Intervention
Historically most reproductive matters—including decisions about whether to terminate a pregnancy—have been left to the domain of women. It is only relatively recently that men have sought to intervene into what had previously been an almost exclusively female sphere. A major challenge to women’s reproductive autonomy came in the eighteenth century with the advent of male midwifery, a development that, in turn, led to the emergence of the fields of obstetrics and gynecology. Guided by the conviction that their approach to women’s reproduction was informed by the latest science, these trained male midwives and physicians also sought to establish the necessity of their professional specializations and to gain financial control over the reproductive field by cutting out their female competitors. In doing so, they inevitably faced and had to make decisions about how to respond to the practice of abortion.
A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery
William Smellie
London: Printed for D. Wilson, 1766
Because many pregnant women as well as female midwives opposed the idea of men’s involvement in childbirth, practitioners like William Smellie sought to demonstrate their necessity by highlighting the superiority of their methods over traditional techniques. One way was by developing and advocating for the use of new medical instruments. Here Smellie extolls the superiority of the forceps over traditional hand delivery, asserting that by the former “we are enabled to save many children, which otherwise must have been destroyed.” The growth of male midwifery worked to break down the bonds between women around all matters of reproduction, depriving many women of traditional sources of knowledge about reproductive control.
Eutokia: A Word to Physicians and to Women
Horatio Robinson Storer, M.D.
Boston: A. Williams & Co., 1863
A major contributor to the fields of obstetrics and gynecology, Dr. Horatio Storer was also the driving force behind the newly created American Medical Association’s opposition to abortion. As the title page of this pamphlet notes, Storer had recently authored the treatise On Criminal Abortion in America in which he asserted that “medical men are the physical guardians of women and their offspring; [and] from their position and peculiar knowledge necessitated in all obstetric matters to regulate public sentiment and to govern the tribunals of justice.” Here Storer advocates the use of anesthetic for childbirth, believing that its use will lessen women’s dread of delivery and thereby reduce the “intentional and criminal induction of abortion.”
On the Susceptibility of the Caucasian and African Races to the Different Classes of Disease
E. M. Pendleton, M.D.
Southern Medical Reports vol. 1 (1849)
Although male medical practitioners frequently proclaimed the humanitarian motives behind their interventions into women’s reproductive lives, they might also be driven by other considerations. In this study, for example, Dr. E. M. Pendleton of Georgia expresses concern over the much higher rate of miscarriage among enslaved Black women than among free white women and concludes that it “originates in an unnatural tendency in the African female to destroy her offspring,” a frequent complaint, he continues, among Southern “planters” (i.e. slaveholders). As a Southerner committed to the continuation of race-based slavery, Pendleton refuses to acknowledge that enslaved Black women might have chosen abortion as an act of resistance to a system that treated them and their offspring as property. Instead, he chooses to pathologize it and to treat it as evidence of a racial difference between white and Black women. Pendleton concludes by urging his fellow physicians to address the problem, citing as reasons first “the interest of the planter” and only secondarily “the well being of the African race.”