Babies for the Nation: The Medicalization of Motherhood in Quebec, 1910–1970 (review)

In recent years, numerous studies have documented the "medicalization of maternity" that occurred throughout the Western world during the first decades of the twentieth century. Alarmed by revelations of devastating rates of infant mortality, experts including scientists, doctors, nurses, and social workers launched an international infant welfare moment. Physicians played a leading role, expanding their fields of practice to include prenatal care, childbirth, and child rearing. Many experts blamed mothers for this "slaughter of the innocents," accusing mothers of listening to "old wives' tales," refusing to breast-feed, and failing to seek medical help during pregnancy and birth. In an effort to educate mothers, the infant welfare movement established prenatal and well-baby clinics, visited new mothers, and produced thousands of volumes of advice literature.

Quebec, the largest geographic and the second most populous province in Canada, was dramatically affected by infant mortality, earning the dubious distinction of reporting one of the highest rates in the Western world. As elsewhere, experts viewed the medicalization of maternity as a solution. Nonetheless, Quebec's transformation of maternity differed in significant ways from the rest of Canada. As Denyse Baillargeon, professor of history at the Université de Montréal, demonstrates in her book, Babies for the Nation, the interplay among language, history, culture, and religion in this predominantly French-speaking region with a national identity rooted in the legacy of French colonization forged a distinctive response to the crisis of infant deaths.¹

Drawing upon an astounding array of primary and secondary sources including private and government archives, newspapers, women's, feminist, and medical journals, and sixty-six interviews with mothers, Baillargeon provides a nuanced analysis of the medicalization of motherhood. While some of the terrain will be familiar to students of the period, the author demonstrates that language, religion, and the "national question" shaped the leadership, ideology, and activities of the infant welfare movement in Quebec. In Quebec infant mortality held particular significance because the future of the French nation within Canada was at stake. With high rates of immigration to Canada, virtually none of it from French-speaking nations, and so many babies dying, leaders of the Church, science, and social welfare united in the cause. As in every area of Quebec life, the Roman Catholic Church played a decisive role, through its domination of education, marriage, health services, and charitable institutions. With one priest for every 537 parishioners and more than 90 percent of the population Roman Catholic, the clergy defined social issues for their parishioners, framing their causes and solutions from the pulpit and in the Catholic press.

In a detailed interrogation of the statistics on infant mortality, Baillargeon demonstrates that the Church's teachings played a significant role in methods of reporting infant deaths. Numerous scholars have ascribed Quebec's high rates to poverty, low rates of breast feeding, and the "backwardness" of a predominantly rural population. Baillargeon challenges these assumptions, arguing that poverty alone cannot serve as an explanation since Montreal's Jewish population was one of the poorest groups yet their rates of infant deaths were among the lowest. Baillargeon accounts for this discrepancy as follows: "[U]ntil the 1940s the Quebec rates of infant mortality, especially when the francophone population is concerned, were magnified because of the then very widespread belief that the souls of children who had not been baptized languished in limbo for all eternity" (p. 25). Thus, she suggests, many families chose the label "infant death" rather than still birth in hopes of securing a place for their baby in heaven.

Another key factor in the infant mortality rate among francophone women was the fate of the children of "unwed mothers," the vast majority of whom were given up to crèches run by the Church. Overcrowding, understaffing, and inadequate finances meant that many babies fell prey to infant diarrhea, or...