Caring for Colonial Maternal Bodies

This study explores the history of the biomedical construction of women’s bodies through the medical and socio-cultural responses to maternal health in the early twentieth-century Philippines. It questions how colonial society defined the maternal body within the dynamics of colonial scientific biomedicine and gendered power relations. The paper first contextualizes the changes in education and public health during the US colonial era. It then investigates the colonial maternal body as a distinct biomedical category through content analysis of medical and scientific articles and textbooks on obstetrics. Examining the biomedical construction of maternal bodies of Filipino women shows the tensions in attempts to modernize colonial medicine and to understand the bodies of Filipino mothers in a changing colonial society. Such historical examination of the biomedical construction of women’s bodies provides insights into tracing the roots of obstetrical violence and reclaiming bodily autonomy to decolonize obstetrics.