Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America by Marcia D. Nichols, and: Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire ed. by Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren (review)

Abstract

In 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending constitutional protection for abortion care and delegating reproductive health policy to state legislatures. The majority opinion reversed Roe’s precedent on the thin basis of the Constitution’s “history.” Eighteenth-century scholars, including myself, were quick to note that abortion was legal throughout the American colonies and commonly practiced throughout the Americas. Women’s absence in the Constitution does not stand as a wholesale reflection of the period’s attitudes and practices. However, it was this period that seeded the biopolitical problem of reproductive capacity for people with uteruses, requiring management under the regime of male medical, political, and religious authority. Marcia D. Nichols’s Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America and Baptism through Incision, edited by Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren with translations by Nina M. Scott, show the multifaceted entanglements of reproductive autonomy in the period.