Case Studies in Reproductive Rights and Social Justice

Join the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing for the final Enduring Issues in American Healthcare Colloquium, “Case Studies in Reproductive Rights and Social Justice.” 

 

FROM REPRODUCTIVE HARM TO MONETARY REPARATIONS: TRACING THE HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA’S EUGENIC STERILIZATION PROGRAM

 

Alexandra Minna Stern, PhD, University of Michigan

 

For the past several years, Stern and her research team have reconstructed the history of California’s twentieth-century eugenic sterilization program through the digitization and datafication of more than 50,000 historical records discovered on 19 microfilm reels in a governmental office in Sacramento. Stern will explore demographic patterns and individual stories of compulsory sterilization in California, which performed more procedures than any other state. She will illuminate the historical depth hiding in seemingly bureaucratic medical forms, and discuss how her team’s research is informing both contemporary calls for monetary reparations for victims and the development of digital resources that ensure that this ugly side of the history of public health and reproductive health is not forgotten. 

 

EPIDEMICS AND BIRTH DEFECTS: GENDER, SEX, AND DISABILITIES DURING GERMAN MEASLES AND ZIKA

 

Leslie J. Reagan, PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

Since medical professionals in Brazil linked the unusual number of newborns with microcephaly to the zika virus, it has been compared to rubella (or German measles). Both the German measles pandemic of the early 1960s and the zika outbreak, produced panic about “deformed” babies, public health messages to women to protect themselves, and the hope for a vaccine. Both cases brought abortion and disabilities to the forefront of public discussion. Neither rubella nor zika are fatal diseases. Research priorities, production of vaccines, and their mass distribution, these diseases reveal, often stem from social reasons as well as medical ones. 

 

Dr. Reagan will examine media images and public health advisories regarding German measles and zika. Public health materials and protocols always have myriad—and often contradictory—messages embedded within them. Assumptions about behavior, gender, power, wealth, and abilities percolate through public health recommendations and warnings.  Since people often fall back on familiar interpretations of causation, responsibility and blame during times of crisis—such as epidemics—familiarity with past epidemics may help us recognize old assumptions and inequalities that persist into the present and to produce, instead, more fair and more effective educational materials and protocols.

 

 

About the Speakers

 

Leslie J. Reagan, PhD, is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she also has affiliations in the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College of Law. She is currently writing, “Seeing Agent Orange in the United States and Vietnam:  A Social and Cultural History.”  Recent publications include, “‘My daughter was genetically drafted with me’:  US-Vietnam War Veterans, Disabilities and Gender,” Gender and History (Fall 2016) and “Representations and Reproductive Hazards of Agent Orange” on documentary films in Journal of Medicine, Law, and Ethics (Spring 2011). 

 

Professor Reagan is the author of Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America (University of California Press, 2010). She is author of When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (University of California, 1997), which won the Willard Hurst book award among others. Professor Reagan is co-editor of Medicine’s Moving Pictures: Medicine, Bodies, and Health in American Film and Television (University of Rochester Press, 2007), which includes Reagan’s chapter on Breast Cancer Self-Examination Films.

 

Professor Reagan has received numerous grants for her research in the history of medicine from the National Institutes of Health-National Library of Medicine (NIH), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Mellon, the American Bar Foundation, Rockefeller, the Schlesinger Library, and other institutions. She was elected to the Governing Council of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM), has served on the editorials boards of Gender and History, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of Women’s History.  

 

Alexandra Minna Stern, Ph.D. is Chair and Professor of the Department of American Culture, with appointments in History, Women’s Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She also is a core faculty member in the Latina/o Studies Program and the Science, Technology, and Society Program. Her research has focused on the uses and misuses of genetics in the United States and Latin America. She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America which was published in second edition by University of California Press in 2015. Her latest book, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) was a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences. She leads the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which studies qualitative and quantitative patterns of eugenic sterilization in twentieth-century California; this research is informing policy efforts to provide redress to survivors of compulsory sterilization. Stern has held numerous grants for her work in medical history and health policy, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

 

Please register at the link below.