Reproductive Healthcare and Conceptions of Childbirth in Early America - A Panel Discussion

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This panel brings together two projects on reproductive healthcare and childbirth in early America. As Nora Doyle’s work shows, scholars of early American and Atlantic World history have shown particular interest in the link between perceptions of childbirth pain and the nascent concept of race. Yet by focusing primarily on racial ideology formation, historians have missed opportunities to understand the rich medical cultures in which these women were participants and practitioners. Doyle’s paper focuses on the medical cultures of Native women in early North America to show that these women were concerned about painful and difficult deliveries and therefore availed themselves of a variety of medical techniques and practitioners to manage their birth experiences. Jennifer Reiss’s paper places early American medical and social approaches to impregnation, gestation, parturition, and mothering in the context of early American disability history. It argues that both the male dominated, professionalizing, medical community and women themselves understood the female body and its reproductive labor as disabled and disabling, respectively. While providing a deep history for the current crisis in reproductive healthcare, the paper also suggests that thinking about reproduction as disablement should give additional meaning and nuance to how historians assess the concept of disability before the antebellum era.