Lauren MacIvor Thompson
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About Lauren
MacIvor Thompson is a historian of the intersections of American medicine, law, and women’s health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Gender and Women’s Studies at Kennesaw State University and serves as a faculty fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health, & Society. Her book, “Women’s Bodies, Doctors’ Rights: The Politics of Birth Control in America” is under advance contract with Rutgers University Press.
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Explains that the original Comstock law contained a medical exemption, and its removal signified a complex history concerning medical expertise, birth control, and abortion.
Notes that today, in the United States, statistics for both maternal and infant mortality remain grim compared to others in the developed world, and the rates of epidurals are 10% higher than they were just 10 years ago. Helps shed light on the historic factors that contributed to them. Explores the increasingly contentious relationship between women and physicians in the early part of the twentieth century over the new labor technique of “Twilight Sleep.”
Examines how ideals of contract freedom within the women’s rights movement challenged medical and medical jurisprudence theories about women between 1870 and 1930.
Analyzes the connection between eugenics, the professionalization of American medicine, and the development of the specialties of obstetrics and gynecology.