Signs of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s by Nathan Stormer (review)

Nathan Stormer’s Signs of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s offers a thoughtful and engaging excavation of historic deliberation that uses abortion to argue about best possible futures for American civilization. Certainly, abortion and the rhetoric of abortion are impossibly large topics, the full range of which cannot comprehensively be explored even within a 256-page monograph. It is perhaps helpful to begin this review with a statement of what Signs of Pathology is not. In so doing, I follow Stormer’s introduction, which is careful to delimit the scope of his project and the possible readings of it. Some of these delimiters are obvious. The timeframe of the examination (1800s–1960s) excludes contemporary abortion rhetorics from scrutiny. The adjective “medical” in the subtitle further limits the inquiry to more technical venues and registers.

The other primary delimiter for Signs of Pathology is subtler. As my opening suggests, Stormer’s project is about the use of abortion rhetorics more than those rhetorics themselves. This is an elusive distinction that the author takes great care to articulate. Specifically, the key distinction, as Stormer clarifies, is about the difference between fighting over and fighting through. That is, Signs of Pathology is not an exploration of historic rhetoric about abortion or over abortion; rather, it is about the rhetorical work of social engineering as practiced through abortion discourses. As Stormer puts it, “The fighting over perspective focus on near-term goals and assumes that the issues contested via abortion, such as the limits of women’s self-determination, can be addressed to some degree by the right policy. . . . By contrast, the fighting through perspective explored in this book shifts attention away from battles won and lost and instead emphasizes the conditions upon which the struggle continues” (1). Signs of Pathology interrogates the use of abortion as topos and trope in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century debates about the health of society at large and about the health of a population. Along the way, Stormer traces how physicians of the time medicalize and pathologize the state of society and deploy abortion prevalence and/or access as a primary diagnostic indicator for the health of a nation.

Principally, Signs of Pathology is a work of rhetorical genealogy and historiography that knits a wide range of archival materials into a compelling narrative. The progression of Signs of Pathology mirrors the recursion of case and analysis. That is, the introduction and chapter 2 provide critical exegeses on methodology and theory, and chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5 hash out the details of successive epochs of abortion rhetoric. The archival chapters each showcase principle rhetors who serve as avatars of their respective periods or arguments, and the organization of these chapters is primarily chronological. Specifically, chapter 1 traces the emergence of abortion as a socio-political and economic issue in the early 1800s, whereas chapters 3 and 4 offer accounts of anti-Malthusian and neo-Malthusian abortion rhetorics, respectively. Finally, chapter 5 details the medical and social contexts that led to full legalization with Roe v. Wade.

Signs of Pathology, however, is not only a rhetorical genealogy but also a substantive contribution to rhetorical theory in the once neglected area of memory studies. In Stormer’s text, rhetoric through abortion functions as a crucible on which he hammers out the nuances of rhetorical mnesis. For Stormer, the classical understanding of mnesis as stylistic trope is insufficient for his genealogical project. Accordingly, he reinvents and reimagines mnesis within an interdisciplinary rhetorical–cultural studies idiom. As a result, mnesis becomes “a figurative process that manifests a sense of place” (50). It is a recursive process whereby “iterating contacts between past and present restrict to whom or what a discourse is addressed” (p. 50). With this new understanding as a foundation, Signs of Pathology artfully weds Stormer’s interest in memory with genealogical method...