? ? Although in recent years miscarriage has generated a social movement dedicated to recognizing and mourning pregnancy loss, it has received virtually no historical attention. My book in progress, Ambiguous Motherhood: Miscarriage and Birth Defects in Twentieth-Century America, enlarges our knowledge of the history of obstetrics, but expands beyond it to investigate epidemiology, public health, and popular health movements as well as emotions, mourning, disease, and disability. I am applying for support to allow me to finish writing and revising my book manuscript on the history of pregnancy loss and teratology. This project questions the current assumption that the meaning of miscarriage is universal and unchanging and provides insight into the variety of emotional responses and the historical creation of normative expectations for emotional responses. Those insights should prove useful to hospital staff who, in this case, are apparently being trained to respond to their patients in a formulaic fashion. ? ? One of our understandings of miscarriage is that the cause of miscarriage is some type of problem in fetal development. I investigate several specific moments when environmental causes of miscarriage and birth defects were identified (namely syphilis, thalidomide, rubella, and herbicides) and became part of the public, political discourses as well as the subject of scientific research. This book asks when, how, and why pregnancy loss and birth defects move beyond the arena of family and hospital, beyond the """"""""private"""""""" dilemmas and distress of families and medical professionals, to become issues of national and international importance. At various moments, pregnancy loss and birth defects have become public problems and garnered the attention of Congress, federal agencies, the courts, and the media. Through the comprehensive analysis of social movements, court cases, media coverage, and health practices, this book tracks the expectations of ordinary citizens and their efforts to make the state work on their behalf as well as the American state s longstanding interest in reproduction. ? ? ? ?
