Perspective: It’s time to stop viewing pregnant women as threats to their babies
Michelle Disher and others dressed as characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale,” protest outside the Georgia Capitol where Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, was to sign legislation on May 7 banning abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. By Kathleen Crowther Kathleen Crowther teaches in the department of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma and has published numerous articles on the cultural history of the Scientific Revolution.
But if the sponsors of these bills are willfully obtuse about female physiology, they stand squarely within a very long history in western medical thought of regarding the womb as a dangerous place and imagining fetuses as in dire need of protection from the women who carry them. It's that very thinking that we must overturn, relying instead on science and offering support and understanding, not suspicion and investigation, for women who miscarry.
In the 10th century, the Persian physician 'Ali ibn al-'Abbas al-Majusi posited that smallpox, an endemic disease that afflicted a high percentage of children, was caused by menstrual blood. In the womb, he claimed, the fetus absorbed the mother’s menstrual blood, which was toxic. After birth, this poison remained in the child’s bloodstream. The fevers, pain, rashes and pustules of smallpox were the body’s efforts to purge menstrual toxins from the body.
Both popular and medical literature abounded with stories of babies born deformed in various ways because of maternal imagination — like the baby born with hair all over its body because its mother looked at a picture of John the Baptist dressed in animal pelts while having sex; or the baby that looked like a frog because his mother had been holding a frog in her hand while having sex; or the white princess who gave birth to a black baby because she looked at a picture of a “Moor.
By contrast, a search for “environmental toxins” and “pregnancy” pulled up just 651 articles. This striking disparity indicates the degree to which concerns about fetal well-being still focus on threats to the fetus from the mother, not the external environment.
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