Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm
Reihe: Studies in Social Medicine
The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940
Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm
Reihe: Studies in Social Medicine
ISBN: 978-1-4696-7586-2
Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press
O'Brien illustrates how ideas about maternal worth and unborn life developed in tandem. Eighteenth-century priests sought to save unborn souls through cesarean section, while nineteenth-century doctors aimed to salvage some unmarried women's social reputations via therapeutic abortion. By the twentieth century, eugenicists wished to regenerate the nation's racial profile, in part by sterilizing women in public clinics. The belief that medical interventions could redeem women, children, and the nation is what O'Brien refers to as "salvation though surgery." As operations acquired racial and religious significances, Indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and mixed-race people's bodies became sites for surgical experimentation. Even during periods of Church-state conflict, O'Brien argues, the religious valences of experimental surgery manifested in embodied expressions of racialized, and often-coercive, medical science.