Description:

Speaker

Sara Rodriguez - Global Health, Northwestern University

Title

“Skillful attendance during labor itself”: Maternal Mortality and the State, 1750-1990"

Abstract

In 1987, following the first global conference on maternal mortality, the United Nations launched the Safe Motherhood Initiative (SMI), a global campaign to reduce maternal deaths. A core part of this effort was for more births to be assisted by skilled attendants. Though it was not until 1987 that a global conference was held on ways to reduce maternal mortality, individual countries had been attempting to do so since at least the 1750s when Spain, for example, required midwives to pass an oral exam and be licensed by the state. During the more than 200 years between Spain’s actions and the launching of the SMI, a central focus of state and then global efforts to reduce maternal deaths has been on training and regulating birth attendants. In this talk, I will consider this history through a series of cases illustrative of the concentration on the training and oversight of childbirth attendants, themselves most often female. I will further consider how these two interventions arose from and reinforced the medicalization of childbirth, and how they arose from and reinforced the belief that a route for a state modernizing was through the oversight of female bodies.

Biography

Sarah B. Rodriguez is a medical historian who focuses on the history of women’s reproductive health since the early 20th century, the history of clinical care, and the history of clinical research ethics. Her most recent book is The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation. Rodriguez is currently working on the history of maternal mortality as a global health concern.