| This is a history of medical anti-abortion rhetoric in the United States, roughly 1850 to 1880. Taking a performative perspective on rhetoric, the vaginal exam is discussed as a form of corporeal literacy that also functioned as a means of procreative discipline. Orchestrated by the American Medical Association, the early anti-abortion campaign relied on the knowledge created from reading women's bodies and also used the practices that created that knowledge, the exam, as a way of enforcing anti-abortion principles. The vaginal exam and its rhetoric are situated within rationalist Enlightenment epistemology and theorized through the classical rhetorical canons of invention and memory, albeit from a postmodern vantage point. Based on the documents of medical journals and treatises, the author argues that bourgeois white women's reproductive organs were transformed into resources for inventing a cultural memory of reproductive destiny and threat and physician's hands and eyes were transformed into devices for reading and writing that memory. |
