U.S. Lawmakers became increasingly concerned with counting and categorizing the births and deaths of babies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What spurred local, state, and federal lawmakers’ interest in the number of babies born and the causes of infant deaths? And what can this history tell us about the recent increase in state laws that regulate reproduction? This panel offers three investigations into how and why local, state, and federal officials became ever more granular in how they tabulated infant life and death and draws a direct line from regulating women’s reproductive capacities to the project of modern state-building.

“Hiding in Plain Sight: Recovering (Hi)stories of Abortion in the Late Nineteenth-Century South,” beings with a 1875 jury of inquest investigated a case of suspected infanticide in Charlotte, North Carolina which illustrates the challenges of uncovering abortion histories in the late nineteenth-century south. Building on the historical scholarship that demonstrates the complexity of American attitudes towards the practice in the past, this paper argues that those viewpoints have long been obscured because of challenges associated with recovering histories of abortion. Indeed, the ongoing conflation between infanticide and abortion, which emerged after the Civil War as anti-abortion activists sought to reframe abortion as a form of murder, has obscured cases of abortion in the historical record making them harder for contemporary historians to find. Drawing from newspaper accounts and court records of such interwoven cases, this paper interrogates how popular understandings of both crimes both shaped understandings of, and obscured understandings of, abortion in the late nineteenth-century south.

“Wretched Neighborhoods and National Vitality: Framing Infant Mortality in the Early Twentieth Century,” explores the infant mortality studies published by the U.S. Children’s Bureau alongside publications from AASPIM to explore how each group framed the problem of infant death and how these conversations provide insight into the changing meaning, and regulation, of pregnancy in the early twentieth century. Given current racial disparities of infant mortality and the simultaneous policing and neglect of pregnant Americans, scrutinizing the rise of governmental discussions of infant mortality can provide new insight into our present-day crises.

“A Help One Another Club: Teaching Motherhood and Citizenship through the Sheppard-Towner Act,” focuses on the educational programs that the Children’s Bureau and state bureaus ran with Sheppard-Towner funding. Sheppard-Towner programs aimed to standardize American “mothercraft” and to teach citizenship through educational initiatives – little mothers’ leagues, mothers’ courses, educational films, and instructional material mailed to mothers. Much of this educational information came directly from the Children’s Bureau and reflected federal and state agent’s belief that there was one “correct” method of childrearing which, could and should be taught to all American mothers. Through these educational programs, both state and national bureaus gained greater access to the intimate lives of their constituents and tried their best to shape familial relations nationwide. Moreover, they taught mothers and children how to see and engage with state and federal agencies and how to exchange personal data for state services.