Interpreting the Remnants of Women’s Reproductive Crises: Physicians and the Shifting Legal Terrain of Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, Cuban authorities produced an unprecedented volume of documentation concerning the conspicuous appearance of fetal remains, infant cadavers, and abandoned infants in public places across the island. Although the physical presence of these bodies and tissue was not new to the mid-nineteenth century, the evolution of the law and a rapidly shifting urban landscape made the material evidence of women’s responses to unwanted pregnancy more legible and more meaningful to Cuba’s colonial state. Yet, for police and judges, the domains of pregnancy and childbirth remained far beyond their training and expertise. They relied on an emerging professional class of physicians to produce and interpret evidence confirming criminality. However, the ongoing professionalisation of Cuban medicine, and in particular the emergence of a medical elite of foreign-educated obstetricians, created frictions within the medical community, and between physicians and judges. Each group of men articulated different – often competing – interpretations of the evidence, which served their broader professional goals and vision of Cuba’s future. Emerging out of these confrontations over the meaning of the material remains of reproductive crises were key contradictions in the prevailing understandings of the law, ones that hinged on race, class, and gender in perceptions of criminality.