Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Felicity M. Turner (review)

Reviewed by: Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Felicity M. Turner Holly N. S. White (bio) Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America. By Felicity M. Turner. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 246. Cloth, 99. 00; paper, 29. 95. ) On June 24, 2022, the U. S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that made access to abortion a legal right. When originally ruled upon in 1973, Roe restored to American women what they had incrementally lost: the ability to make choices regarding their own pregnant bodies. Felicity M. Turner's timely Proving Pregnancy reminds readers that women historically possessed sole medical expertise about—and access to—pregnant, postnatal, and fetal bodies. Although Turner's work is not a history of abortion, the themes explored in Proving Pregnancy, such as medical knowledge, race, gender, and law, have shaped how Americans understand this polarizing issue today. Over the course of six chapters, as well as an introduction and conclusion, Turner chronologically moves through her study. Turner largely relies on legal sources culled from Connecticut and North Carolina. She combines these regional sources with nationally circulated documents such as newspapers, pamphlets, and medical reports. Chapter 1 establishes the significant role that midwives—and women as a whole—played as experts in early American courts. Through early nineteenth-century infanticide cases, Turner demonstrates that knowledge regarding the reproductive female body was "intangible property, " which only women could possess. She argues that this unique form of End Page 118 property provided all women—free, enslaved, white, and Black—with a level of power and authority previously unrecognized in histories of the early United States. Regardless of status or ethnicity, women's knowledge of pregnant, postnatal, and fetal bodies was always prioritized over that of any man. Chapter 2 traces how a rising class of college-educated physicians transformed the intangible into something tangible, specifically a medical license. Over the antebellum period, states reinforced this transition by passing legislation that required a license to inspect and authoritatively comment on a human body. As medical practice and authority became professionalized, it simultaneously became out of reach for women and people of color. This change prompted American courts to also reconsider who should qualify as an expert on female and fetal bodies, shifting recognition from experienced female midwifes to inexperienced, though medically trained and "certified, " male doctors. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the impacts abolition had on the creation of medical knowledge about female and Black bodies. Because white men lost the ability to own the physical bodies of African Americans, Turner argues that "those in power moved swiftly to control the language. . . used to describe and characterize those bodies" (10). During Reconstruction, licensed physicians created new racialized and gendered narratives to define the capabilities of human bodies, specifying what bodies "could do, had done, and why" (10). Racist and sexist ideas about civilization and citizenship that were circulated in the popular press were then paired with these medical "definitions. " Through those publications, infanticide became a racially defined crime in American culture, one that only Black women could perpetrate. The last two chapters of Turner's Proving Pregnancy explore the consequences of the shifts in medical knowledge, race, gender, and law. By the end of the nineteenth century, licensed physicians had successfully replaced women as experts in cases regarding the female body, especially in infanticide cases. This absolute authority allowed white, male physicians to restrict and classify female and Black bodies as problematic and at risk for behavioral issues and insanity. The culmination of these efforts, Turner concludes, stripped women and people of color of the intangible property and power they once owned. By conceptualizing knowledge regarding the pregnant, postnatal, and fetal body as a unique form of gendered property, Turner reveals the important legal and medical roles women played in early America. As she argues, it is only through reframing "traditional understandings of property" that scholars can truly generate new and more accurate narratives of End Page 119 U. S. women's history (159). Thus Turner's Proving Pregnancy is not the standard progressive march toward women's rights. Rather. . .