Date: Monday, December 2nd, 2024, from 12:15-1:45pm 

Location: Calder Lounge (Uris Hall 107) 

Series: Patriarchal Violence 

Speakers: Elizabeth O'Brien (University of California, Los Angeles)

Respondent: Eleanor Johnson (Columbia University)

Obstetric violence is characterized by medical neglect, unconsented intervention, and demeaning treatment of pregnant and birthing people. It is a particular, and particularly gendered, form of institutional and social violence that both stems from, and exacerbates, other oppressions and vulnerabilities. For example, obstetric racism is one form of obstetric violence that partially accounts for the unacceptably high rate of maternal mortality among Black, Latino, and Indigenous women in the United States. This talk will place Mexico within a transnational history of obstetric violence. It offers a new genealogy of the concept, beginning with the priest-surgeons of Spain’s late Bourbon empire, during which time the Spanish Crown declared that the spiritual life of an embryo was of greater importance than the corporeal life of its mother. Moving throughout scientific racism in the nineteenth century and to eugenics in the early twentieth century, the talk explores how Catholic theology affected— and was affected by—developments in maternal/fetal science. Even during periods of Church-state conflict, the religious valences of experimental surgery manifested in embodied expressions of racialized, and often-coercive, medical science. Examining this history underscores the long history, and persistent legacy, of religious prerogatives in the provenance of reproductive healthcare.

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