This article represents a step towards examining the relationship between three key figures in the antebellum American South: the plantation mistress, the slave-midwife, and the professional male physician. It elucidates how the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, which brought women close to death, formed the basis of a deeper, positive relationship between the black and white women of the antebellum South, and assesses the ways in which the professionalization of medicine affected this reproductive bond. Evaluating such a complicated network of relationships necessitates dissecting numerous layers of social interaction, including black and white women's shared cultural experiences and solidarity as reproductive beings; the role, power, and significance of slave-midwives and other enslaved caretakers in white plantation births; the cooperation between pregnant bondswomen and plantation mistresses; and the impact that the burgeoning profession of medicine had on the procreative union between antebellum black and white women.

The use of food as American war propaganda finds its origins in the First World War, when anti-German sentiment prompted Americans to rename German foods. The First World War also signifies an important turning point in the history of American food consumption because it represents a shift in eating habits, culinary practices, and domestic food preparation, including the infiltration of fresh home-grown fruit and vegetables and preserved or canned foods into the US diet, and the introduction of supermarkets. All of these changes, however, would have been impossible without the mobilization of middle-class American women on the home front, and the synergy between civil society and government propaganda. By using poster and grass-roots campaigns to appeal to their activities in the private sphere of the household and their pre-existing activism in the public sphere, the United States Food Administration, under the leadership of Herbert Hoover, was able to convince women to ‘rally around the flag’ to change the dietary habits of both adults and children, and conserve valuable food which could be sent to the ‘starving people of Europe’ and Allied soldiers on the warfront.

In 1971, lay California abortion provider Harvey Karman set out to revolutionize second trimester abortion just as he had done for first trimester abortion with his eponymous suction curette, the Karman cannula. An ardent critic of hypertonic saline instillation and surgical procedures such as hysterotomy, his plan was to introduce a new abortion procedure he had developed--the super coil technique--which, he believed, would finally replace all other methods to become the one and only undisputed second trimester abortion technology. What resulted, however, was a medical fiasco that prompted investigations by American federal agencies, such as the CDC and the FDA. These investigations had the net effect of increasing regulations on the development, testing and implementation of reproductive technologies in the United States.

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