Proving Pregnancy

“Proving Pregnancy tells the stories of the many women who were prosecuted for infanticide—sometimes wrongly, but sometimes rightly. Ultimately, Turner argues that, taken together, their stories challenge the prevailing narratives of property, particularly as it is understood in relation to the body.”—Journal of American History

“Proving Pregnancy is a powerfully written piece of scholarship that puts its sources to excellent use. . . . The book proves itself to be of indispensable use to historians investigating the links between gender, race, and medicine.”—Journal of African American History

“This well-written history bears a meaningful resemblance to the post-Roe era. Anyone interested in the present-day devolution of women’s bodily autonomy will learn how Americans once empowered women, not individually but as a group, to police one another. . . . [A] worthwhile read.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“Turner has uncovered an important and provocative set of sources and opened a path for further investigation of troubled births, in the past and present.”—Nursing Clio

“In this illuminating new book, Felicity Turner makes a vital contribution to the growing scholarship around women’s reproductive health in the nineteenth century. . . . The rich and challenging stories she weaves using coroners’ inquests make this a fascinating, though often heart-breaking, book to read.”—Gender & History

“A call for scholars to recognize knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth as akin to a form of property. . . . Proving Pregnancy challenges the progressive narrative of history, showing how as women and African Americans achieved some gains in rights, they sacrificed an important source of power they had once monopolized.”—Black Perspectives

“Proving Pregnancy offers a valuable contribution to historians’ understanding of how modern concepts of identity and community are shaped by gender and sexuality, as well as how knowledge can constitute a form of ownership.”—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“Turner’s timely Proving Pregnancy reminds readers that women historically possessed sole medical expertise about—and access to—pregnant, postnatal, and fetal bodies. Although Turner’s work is not a history of abortion, the themes . . . such as medical knowledge, race, gender, and law, have shaped how Americans understand this polarizing issue today.”—Journal of the Civil War Era

“Turner shifts our understanding of the nineteenth-century issue of infanticide from a focus solely on criminality and deviancy to a thoughtful gendered intellectual history of property rights.”—Deirdre Cooper Owens, author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

“Innovative and original. Turner elucidates the underlying legal and cultural dynamics that orchestrated regulation around pregnancy, birth, and infant death, and the implications for how medical knowledge and criminal law developed constitutive authority over women’s bodies.”—Yvonne Pitts, author of Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky