Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 19th Century in North America was a time of many social and scientific changes that impacted the field of medicine. A result of one such change was the medicalization of childbirth, as the primary care of women during labour shifted from midwives to physicians. While there is ample discourse on the many factors that contributed to this shift, there is very little discussion on the role played by abortion. Studying abortion in the 19th Century is often limited by a paucity of primary sources from the physicians who performed abortions and women who obtained them. Although most authors who discuss the midwifery shift do not make any mention of a role played by the issue of abortion, it has been addressed and supported by primary sources. This raises the question, why is abortion not discussed in histories on the medicalization of childbirth by other authors? The objectives of this paper are historical and histographic. First, it will present the evidence on the use of abortion as a political tool employed by some policy makers, physicians and the media to discourage women from choosing midwives for their childbirth care. Second, it will analyze possible reasons why this topic is not addressed by the majority of historians of childbirth in 19th Century North America. Are the authors concerned about the varying social views of abortion, the associated politics, the lack of primary sources, or are they personally uncomfortable with the subject? Only the authors themselves can truly know their reasons for neglecting the subject of abortion in their work, but this analysis will show how issues that influence historians determine the version of the past that is produced and propagated into the present and the future. Borst CG. Catching Babies: the Professionalization of Childbirth, 1870-1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Bourgeault B, Davis-Floyd R, eds. Reconceiving Midwifery. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Dodd DE, Gorham D, eds. Caring and Curing: Historical Perspectives on Women and Healing in Canada. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994. Wertz DC, Wertz RW. Lying In; a History of Childbirth in America (expanded edition published 1989 by Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz) New York: Free Press; London: Macmillan, 1977. Reagan LJ. Linking midwives and abortion in the Progressive Era. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 1995; 69(4):569-98. Reagan LJ. When Abortion Was a Crime, Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973. London: University of California Press, 1997.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".