Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940 by Karen Weingarten (review)

A solid work of American Studies scholarship should be truly interdisciplinary at the same time it strives to challenge its audience to scrutinize a deeply ingrained ideology. Karen Weingarten’s Abortion in the American Imagination does this with verve. By drawing a trajectory from Anthony Comstock’s attempts to regulate morality in the late-nineteenth century, to popular fiction of the early-twentieth century, to abortion’s ties with economics and labor philosophy, Weingarten demonstrates that the contemporary abortion discourse of “life” and “choice” reveals that, despite crossing disciplines, the issue has landed in the nebulous realm of morality: “[…] the use of the terms life and choice is caught in liberal American ideals of individuality, autonomy, and self-responsibility, which work to obscure abortion’s entanglement in larger questions of race, eugenics, biopolitics, and, of course, gender” (2–3). In order to disentangle the rhetorical moves of the contemporary abortion debate, we need to recognize that abortion discourse is bound up in a version of liberalism that, despite valuing “the autonomous, self-reliant, individual citizen who singular rights must be protected above all” (6), premises protection by the state on “recognizing only certain forms of life and only under certain conditions” (7).

To my mind, Weingarten’s method of recognizing the limitations of liberalism’s relationship to reproductive rights is the strongest feature of the book. Throughout, she tracks instances of the way abortion rhetoric is used to discipline women’s bodies and how this alters and affects their participation in American life. Weingarten proves that white women “were disciplined into viewing their bodies as national vessels for reproduction and believing that disrupting this process was against the nation-state and their race” (19). One solid piece of evidence to this effect is her reading of The Great “Trunk Mystery” from 1871, a dime novel that sensationalized the story of a white girl found in a trunk on a Chicago train after she died from a botched abortion. The case, Weingarten argues, “made explicit the new collusion between those who explicitly care for the biological needs and those who govern those bodies through the forces of law” (25), as well as exposing the way antiabortion advocates used the racial markers of usually foreign abortion doctors to emphasize threat to the survival of white America.

Weingarten aptly continues this idea of the threat to white America in the next two chapters that focus on morality, eugenics, and population control. The chapter entitled “The Inadvertent Alliance of Anthony Comstock and Margaret Sanger” is my favorite for two reasons: it reframes the sociopolitical narratives of two famous, controversial, and very different figures in turn-of-the-century debates about sexuality in surprising and productive ways; and it establishes the principles for Weingarten’s adept literary readings of popular novels and their subsequent films in Chapter Three, further framing how political and legal discourse produced new, competing social realities for women. Weingarten names Comstock’s obsession with “responsibilization,” or the ethic that “reproduction can be controlled through generating particularized knowledge about what constitutes responsible behavior” (50) as a disciplining device for white, middle-class women. In what may seem like a leap to some, Weingarten proves that Sanger’s antiabortion rhetoric was also a disciplining device, though framed through her eugenicist tendencies for “the need for the ‘cleaner,’ better-‘controlled’ form of birth control that would ultimately lead to a better human race” (64).

In a time when there are daily threats to women’s reproductive rights, Weingarten’s Abortion in the American Imagination is prescient and needed, reminding us all to question our discursive assumptions about a notoriously divisive issue. It joins only few other studies of the same nature that boldly examine such a contentious issue—namely, Heather Latimer’s Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction and Film (2013) and Leslie Regan’s groundbreaking When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States...