JJF: This episode comes with a content warning. We will be talking about infanticide, abortion, and miscarriages. Take care of yourselves, everyone.
JJF: Since Roe versus Wade was overturned in the USA in 2022, there’s been increasing concern regarding how technologies like period tracking apps might be used in abortion court cases. We know that these apps are not reliable, but the fear is growing that they might be used as evidence anyway. Surprisingly, it actually helps to understand better how and why unreliable technology like fertility tracking apps might be used by turning to history, specifically 18th century German laws and technologies regarding infanticide. And brace yourself, listener. This means we have to talk about Immanuel Kant.
JJF: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Cyborg Goddess. I’m your host, Jennifer Jill Fellows. And today, I’ve invited Dr. Charlotte Sabourin on the show. Dr. Charlotte Saburin is an instructor at Douglas College. So she’s a colleague of mine. She teaches in Gender Sexualities and Women’s Studies and in the Philosophy Department. Her research focuses on Immanuel Kant’s practical philosophy, early modern philosophy, and the history of feminist philosophy. And today, she’s here to talk to me about historical medical technologies, 18th century German attitudes towards infanticide, and Kantian ethics. Some heavy stuff. But hopefully, some fun stuff.
JJF: Hi, Charlotte. Welcome to this show.
Charlotte Sabourin: Hi, Jill. Thank you for inviting me.
JJF: Before we begin, I want to pause to recognize that the physical space that my podcast is on. I think we’re now more than ever being encouraged to actually think of digital tools and digital technologies as somehow separate from physical space, as though things like ChatGPT had no impact on the land or the water, and as though the massive amounts of infrastructure and energy required to build and maintain the digital technologies we use every day leave no physical trace. But we know this isn’t so. My podcast is not ephemeral. Cyborg Goddess is produced on the unceded land of the Coast Salish people of the qiqéyt Nation. And Charlotte, can you tell me where you’re located today?
CS; Yeah, thank you for letting me do a land acknowledgment as well. I’m at my office at Douglas College, which you know very well, and also on unceded traditional ancestral land of the qiqéyt nation in this case.
JJF: Okay, so I want to back up a little bit before we dive into, like, Kantian ethics and 18th century German attitudes. And I want to ask how it was that you became interested in philosophy as a subject of study to begin with.
CS: It’s funny, I have not reflected on that very often recently. I don’t know about you. It’s just not something that I reflect a lot on, but I enjoyed thinking back about it, and I think I was mostly interested in literature at the time. And I always enjoyed reading and writing, like a lot of my fellow philosopher colleagues. And I think it will sound cliche, but I think philosophy really unlocked new ways of thinking for me, new ways of thinking about and engaging in reading and writing, as well. And I think I just found that really fun and stimulating. So I think that’s where it came from, essentially. Even more than an interest for a topic. It was new ways of doing things that I found stimulating and fun.
JJF: Oh, that’s cool. So it isn’t so much the topic as, like, the approach and different writing styles and different, like, analyses that were possible and different questions that were possible. I think that’s really interesting.
CS: Yeah. Like, I think, I remember doing work in literature that I found really cool and really interesting, and I was ending up, always, reflecting on, Oh, what can we say on labor, from this novel or something like that? The oh, like, maybe philosophy would be a good place to think about these things.
JJF: Yeah, and I think we don’t have this at Douglas College yet, maybe. But a lot of other institutions have, like, a philosophy and literature class, right? Like, there’s definitely crossover between these two different approaches or areas of study.
CS: Yeah.
JJF: So that makes a lot of sense to me. Did you do philosophy and literature?
CS: I didn’t, actually. I never did. I would find it very interesting to take that class. If you’d ever teach it, let me know. I would love to.
JJF: Okay, so I kind of understand how you got pulled into philosophy now. But one of your specific areas of research is looking at Kant. So, Immanuel Kant, fairly famous philosopher. So how did you become interested specifically in looking at Kant and even more specifically in looking at Kant from a feminist perspective? Because I don’t know how many listeners to the pod are familiar with Immanuel Kant, but you can Google him if you’re not familiar listeners. He’s not the most feminist guy.
CS: Yeah, that is a very valid question, Jill, thanks for asking. And, yeah, yeah, indeed, if you Google Kant and women or Kant and feminism, you will not find a whole lot of references and especially positive references because he was indeed pretty misogynist and racist and other unpleasant things. What drove me into that was that originally, very honestly, I was just interested in Kant. I was an undergrad student in philosophy, and I don’t think I even know what feminist philosophy was at the time. Things were pretty different. I think, you know, looking back at when I went to undergrad, but also the specific context of where I completed my undergrad degree, which was a bit more French-like institution and mentality. I had excellent professors, but there was really no feminist philosophy course there. And I actually vividly remember reading only one woman philosopher throughout my entire bachelor’s degree, and that woman was Martha Nussbaum. So I remember that very well.
JJF: Wow. Yeah, Martha Nussbaum. Yep, yep.
CS: And, you know, I remember even, like, at the time being super critical of her stuff, which there’s plenty of room to be critical of various philosophers. But after a while, it did occur to me, like, Okay, but that’s a little weird that I only read one woman, you know, and at some point, that made me a little angry, and I started getting angrier and angrier and wondering why there weren’t more women assigning my courses. And I think I got even angrier when I understood that. . . Like, at first, I think I thought of this as, Oh, I guess, not many women do philosophy.
JJF: Mm hm.
CS: And then I realized that, no, there’s actually plenty of women. It’s just that they’re not at the forefront of any of the courses that I can take or even of most courses or most anthologies.
JJF: Yeah.
CS: So then, yeah, I was still interested in the history of philosophy. That’s always been I think my main passion in philosophy. I like the history side of things. I like, you know, diving into the past lives of people, what they did at the time, the political circumstances. I love the early modern period in general. And for a while, then, despite having started to think about these things, I was further convincing myself that well, probably there were no women at the time who were able to engage in philosophical work. You know, maybe they couldn’t get published. Maybe they were too busy taking care of all their children or, you know, something like that. And while these obstacles are very real, there were, in fact, still women who did engage in philosophical work at the time. And what I realized is that we just have the really bad habit of not regarding their work as a philosophy work or as serious or real philosophy. You probably figure where this is going. So, you know, we start thinking like, Oh, but, you know, it’s a series of letters. It can’t be philosophy, right? Or it’s a theater play. It can’t be philosophy, either. And yet, we’re very okay with Plato writing dialogues, and we’re very fond of, in my field, like Descartes’ or Spinoza’s correspondence and long story short, when it’s men, we don’t care all that much about the format, but when it’s women or other people belonging to marginalized groups, we might be a little more picky when it comes to the format, which is really too bad. And that’s been eye opening to me in terms of thinking of the history of philosophy as well and of how today we have this mainstream gaze on it where we feel very comfortable looking at certain canonical names as they were doing philosophy and ruling out the rest. And to come back to your original question, I was still very interested in Kant. But I do remember thinking about all these things and, you know, wondering, where are the women? What did we say about women at the time? And what did Kant have to say about that? And there I was even more angry and frustrated because Kant has very bad things to say about women, actually, altogether. I think the one that shocked me the most was when I realized that he referred to two of literally the most prominent women’s scholars of his day. That was Anne Dacier and Émilie du Châtelet. Both of them did, like, groundbreaking work, Anne Dacier and translations, commented translations, too, and Émilie du Châtelet in philosophy, metaphysics and physics, as well. And he refers to their work once, and he says, Oh, it’s real nice that they’re engaging in Greek translations or discussions of physics. But, well, you know, they might as well wear a beard because then that might reflect better the level of ambition that they have and, you know, subtext being that their ambitions are going against every expectation that we should have for them.
JJF: Yeah.
CS: So I was a little disappointed in my guy, and I decided to figure out why he said certain things about women, why he didn’t say some other things and how we could have a bit of a consistent account of that rather than seeing his remarks on women or on gender or on institutions that are relevant to women like marriage, for instance, seeing how we can constantly make sense of those rather than thinking that he was having a bad day, that day and that that was just the usual sexist comment that slipped.
JJF: Yeah, I feel like sometimes being a woman in philosophy is just, like, constantly being disappointed with your guy.
CS: Ah, absolutely.
JJF: Like, especially when we’re looking at historical, though there are some contemporary bad actors, too, but, like, I remember absolutely loving going through this period where I absolutely loved Kierkegaard. I thought Kierkegaard was, like, so cool. Kierkegaard also does not have the most flattering things to say about women. And I was like, Aristotle over Plato 100%. And now I’ve kind of reversed. I’m like, I don’t know. At least Plato said we could be philosopher kings. Like at least Plato thought women could be kings. Aristotle.
CS; In theory
JJF: Yeah.
CS: Well, Aristotle to we were monsters straight off, so. . .
JJF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah. I do feel that there’s often this tension because there’s a lot in Kantian ethics that I like. There’s a lot in Kant’s writings that I find really fun to puzzle with. And yet, there’s this tension, right? ‘Cause you’re like, I’m kind of pissed off at him at the same time.
CS: Well, and that’s what to me was a personal saving grace, maybe, because I still like that philosopher, and I still think his work is groundbreaking and fantastic, and I love engaging with it. And I think the way in which I make sense of this for myself is I wonder what led him to think the things that he said about women, about other marginalized groups and why that is. And in some way, I think, I think I’m still doing him justice by doing that, because, like, he was pretty smart, and I think we’re not doing them justice if we try to push under the rug those unpleasant things that they’ve said. So, you know, he should be held accountable, and if he was living by today’s standards, I’m sure he’d be the first to agree that he should be held accountable by his own rules, right? So, you know, and he was able to think outside of the box about many things. He didn’t about women, about people of color and other groups. So, it’s only fair to hold him accountable for that and to ask what this means for his philosophy and his relation with other philosophers as well.
JJF: Before we move on to kind of looking more specifically at our topic today, 18th century German attitudes towards infanticide, can we talk a little bit more. . . now that we know that, Okay, Kant definitely had problematic views, can we talk a little more about who Immanuel Kant is or was? Who he was?
CS: Yes, of course. And that’s a great starting point to understand, I think, the place that he’s coming from sometimes. Kant grew up and spent actually pretty much all of his life in a small German town called Königsberg, which today is weirdly enough, located in Russia. It’s Kaliningrad today. At the time, it was part of the German Empire. And so, his town was in Prussia, more specifically. He comes from a very, pretty working class background, so his family didn’t have. . . Well, working class might not be the best way to make sense of it, but his family didn’t have a lot of money, and Kant himself supported two of his sisters, I think, for most of his life. He only wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, which is his major work fairly late in his life. I don’t remember exactly now how old he was, but that’s always what I look for in terms of, like, maybe, like, my major work is still coming up.
JJF: Right. My greatness is ahead of me.
CS: Yes. As opposed to so many, especially if you look at contemporary philosophers, we’re driven to, like, write and write and publish or perish younger and younger. And it is reassuring to see that it took him some time, you know, and that he was, like many of us, constrained by financial imperative, where he defended his dissertation. And then he had a university job, but his job was very much a bit like what we would regard as a contract job. And,
JJF: it was very precarious for years, as I remember.
CS: Exactly. And at the time, even worse than today, he wasn’t paid by the university. The way you would get paid for these contracts is you would ask students to pay a contribution at the end of every class. So I’m very glad we don’t have to do that. Contract work is still bad, but it’s not that bad.
JJF: Yeah, yeah, that’s so I failed you. Please pay me.
CS: Exactly. That does introduce, you know, complexities.
JJF: Yes, absolutely.
CS: So he never got married, which is something that gets discussed a lot. Sometimes people I feel fall in the psychoanalysis a little too much of, like, maybe he was gay and not out, and that’s why he had all these hard feelings about women, and that’s very possible. I wouldn’t know. And all we know is he never got married. He lived a very quiet life, but he did enjoy having a lot of people over. So he would do those dinner parties. He would invite, like everybody in town. One of his buddies at the time, Theodore Von Hippel was at the time, mayor, and he spoke on behalf of women a lot and in a good way. I mean, he spoke for the rights of women. So there were conversations that were held in Kant’s house that I’m sure had to do with women and with these questions that we are interested in, just like we’re talking now. Kant himself never got married, never had close female friends as far as I’m aware, which might not have helped to give him perspective on what women can do and what women are maybe interested in and so on. But part of why he didn’t get married, which is also interesting to keep in mind is that he very specifically shared that he wouldn’t have been able to provide for a wife and children for most of his life. So that is important, I think, to keep in mind, not so much for his sake, than for the kind of preoccupation we’re going to talk today about the German society at the time and the cost of having a family life and who could enter marriage and who couldn’t enter marriage. And I think Kant is a good example.
JJF: Yeah, and the opportunities for women as well, the idea that you would feel you’d have to provide for a wife because there just weren’t a lot of opportunity for your wife to provide for herself. And I think this also ties to your discussion that he did provide for his sisters for a lot of his life, too, right? So he must have been aware of the lack of economic opportunities that many women had, for example.
CS: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that is discussed by his friend Hippel, as well. The two remain pretty silent well Kant all the more, but even people who discuss women’s situation at the time tend to remain pretty silent on the fact that obviously, working class women had to work, and it’s not new that women were in the workforce. But I think as you’re seeing, what you would earn as a woman, working a working class job would not be enough to support yourself very often. So there was that. And then, yeah, some people had, I think, broader preoccupations about women being able to enter the workforce to enter some jobs that were coveted by men who were well above working class, you know, can women become judges, doctors, and so on? So that was also a discussion that was had at the time. But no matter which angle you look at it, women’s social and economical perspectives were generally not great in that respect.
JJF: And I also think it’s so interesting that the mayor and Kant’s best friend was somebody who was speaking out for more opportunities for women and for women’s rights and stuff. And so, like, I think it’s a really good point to emphasize that, when we’re talking about holding him accountable, he would have known what the arguments were.
CS: Oh, yeah,
JJF: for granting more rights to women. Like, that would have been dinner conversation.
CS: Absolutely. And also, not only would have known, actually he had to respond to claims of him having written one of Hippel’s works because Hippel is famous among other things for having tried to apply Kant’s categorical imperatives, so the idea that treating each and every human being as not merely as means to an end, but as an end in themselves and so on, Hippel extended those considerations explicitly to Okay, well, then why are we treating women as solely means to an end? Why aren’t we giving them proper status? And because of that overlap and because of Kant’s obvious influence on his ideas, Hippel had published that piece anonymously, and Kant had to publish a disclaimer that he was not the author of the piece. So he would, for sure, have been familiar with these topics.
JJF: Right. Right. So you’re talking about the formula of humanity version of the categorical imperative, where it says that we have to treat all rational beings as ends in themselves, that is as inherently worthy and not just as means to our own ends, not just as, like, tools we can use to get what we want.
CS: Exactly.
JJF: Right. Yeah, and I think it’s so interesting that it doesn’t, Like, we call it the formula of humanity today. But it doesn’t say humanity in the original because Kant didn’t necessarily think that all of humanity counted as rational beings, right?
CS: Absolutely. And as I’m sure you’re well aware, that’s a criticism that Charles Mills has also considerably developed with respect to Black people not being included in the scope that Kant intended for the categorical imperative. Yeah, so I think that’s a very, from Hippel at the time, that’s a very potent criticism, I think, of what Kant was doing and also a good way of of showing that there are resources in Kantian Ethics that can be used to maybe think in a better, more just way.
JJF: That Kant created his own rules and then didn’t actually apply his rules correctly. It is sometimes how I’ve seen it for. Like, these are good rules. The author of them is screwing up.
CS: Exactly. And that’s one of the, there’s countless attempts to try to make sense of, you know, how do we reconcile these supposedly universal claims about humanity, as you point out, with all these exceptions that Kant seems comfortable with. And he normally isn’t fine with exceptions, right? Oh, yeah.
JJF: Yeah.
CS: Maybe he was bad at applying his own rules. Maybe it’s just not possible to have a universal rule either, but, yeah, I tend to err on the side of he was definitely bad at applying them.
JJF: So I think we’ve kind of got a picture of who Kant was and where his failings are. But also, I hope that we’ve provided for listeners, why he’s such an important figure in philosophy, why people keep coming back to him. But now I want to talk about specifically the topic at hand today. So you were specifically looking in your most recent research that you shared with me at 18th century Germany and infanticide. So can you talk a little bit about 18th century German attitudes towards infanticide? Like, why was this an issue? What’s going on here?
CS: Absolutely. I still can’t believe that I got interested in that topic, which admittedly is very morbid, but I think hopefully I’ll be able to communicate why it is, I think, an interesting and important topic from a feminist standpoint. It’s a fascinating issue, disturbing, but also fascinating. In Kant’s day, German scholars and politicians got increasingly concerned with the rates of infanticide that they were noticing or that they were speculating were happening. And also concerned with the many convictions that were happening to punish that crime. Which is actually one of the main reasons I got interested in that issue in that first place. So under the criminal code at the time, only women could be prosecuted for infanticide. So that means that
JJF: Whoa. . .
CS: yeah, I know. Men could be prosecuted, of course, but under different charges, the charge of infanticide, we were assuming as a society that that’s something that only a woman can do.
JJF: This is a gender crime.
CS: Exactly.
JJF: Wow. So, in addition to that, then to add maybe a bit of an intersectional perspective on the matter, women were facing different sentences depending on whether they were married or not. So married women who were recognized guilty of infanticide would be sentenced typically to punishments like a year of abstinence or a month of eating only bread or something along these lines.
JJF: Okay,
CS: Which, you know, is not great, but nothing like the punishment faced by unmarried women who are normally sentenced to death or life in prison.
JJF: Those are very different punishments.
CS: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And where I think there’s structural issue at stake is that I mentioned C’s difficulties in even foreseeing getting married at the time. So the poorer you were, the more difficult it would be for you. And there were even regulations preventing peasants, for instance, or people in the military from getting married at the time. So when certain workers were deemed necessary to the State, the State didn’t want them to get married and to live a family life, essentially. So not everybody could get married. Getting married was truly a privilege at the time. And so I think there’s a decent amount of privilege involved in who could access that institution in the first place, which was not necessarily a great, a great thing, but was definitely not accessible to all either.
JJF: Right. So is it fair to say that the majority of women who would have been married would have been like upper class or upper middle class? Like, not working class, not impoverished people, that kind of situation.
CS: Definitely not working class. Actually, very few working class people were even getting married. And there were a fair amount of working class people who were living in partnership, domestic partnerships, just without being married.
JJF: It just wasn’t legally recognized.
CS: Exactly. Without benefiting from, you know, the few rights and privileges that you do have if you’re married. So that to me was especially interesting about infanticide, how not only is it something that only women can get accused of, but then depending on whether the woman is married or not, the outcome will be very different.
JJF: Right.
CS: So that was something that I found especially preoccupying. And then I think the other thing I should say about the context that got me into this very weird topic is that it’s also important to understand that society and the legal system at the time, I think were concerned with infanticide for reasons that were a bit different than the ones that spontaneously come to our mind today if we think of it. So I don’t want to say that the death of a child wouldn’t have been important at the time because that wouldn’t be true, but it was perceived differently. So these were times where infant mortality rates were much, much higher than today. And often something that poor family would be confronted with would be this impossible dilemma where your older children’s survival depends on the food that you’re able to give them by depriving yourself of food, which as a result, can mean that if you’re breastfeeding, you might not produce enough milk for your baby to survive. So this is not me saying that infanticide was a casual thing happening all the time. It definitely wasn’t, but that it’s a much wider scope than what we often think of. So if we think today of infanticide, we think of the image of the crazy mother, and we do associate it with women, right? Like, it kind of has a gendered, like, a
JJF: Yeah, and there’s also that connotation, like you said, the word crazy. Yeah. Which is also problematic.
CS: Sure. Insanity is definitely has been tied into, I think, the history of how we think about infanticide. We expect, you know, the mother who commits the crime to then plead insanity. It was, you know, a moment of. . . she lost it and so on. And this isn’t to say that there was none of that at the time. I’m sure that there was, but that kind of case did not make most of the cases that the German society was concerned with. So I think what people were concerned with was very understandably we’re dealing with a lot of people placed in very, very dire situations, who do not have a lot of options and who in many cases, as we’ll seen, the boundaries of what is infanticide and what is, on the other hand, possible miscarriage or forms of negligence that are caused by, again, not having proper resources. The boundary is very hard to draw, as we’ll see. So I think that was part of the preoccupation that people at the time were struggling with, you know, we’re sentencing to death all these women who we’re seeing are dealing with a lot. Is there something here that we should reconsider, maybe? So yeah, that’s the background that I think motivated me in paying more attention to this, understanding a little bit more what was there. And I was intrigued of going beyond this image that we were talking about of infanticide being a matter of insanity and temporary insanity and associated with the image of a woman who lost it all.
JJF: I think there’s a couple of things that I wanted to highlight from what you said that I think are really worth pondering. And one of them is that I think even today there is still this kind of idea of infanticide as, like, the quote unquote crazy mother. And I wonder, we probably don’t have time to unpack this, but I’m just going to leave it there for our listeners to think of maybe, I wonder how much of that has to do with thinking about the role that, like, mother love or, like, selfless motherhood has, like, the idea that a mother could turn on a child is a really, really hard idea for society, in a way that I don’t think the idea of a father turning on the child is the same way. Obviously, any violence towards children is reprehensible, but I do think that, like, the idea of selfless love built into our concepts of motherhood make this idea an idea that people find to be more unthinkable. And so you reach for this moralizing idea of, like, Well, she lost it, right? Because a real mother wouldn’t do something like that or something like that. But I also think it’s really interesting that, and we’re going to talk about this more, this kind of blurring of the boundaries because depriving yourself of calories to keep your older child alive, which results in not having enough milk to nurse your infant is not what I would call infanticide. Right? Like, that is desperate people making desperate choices. And it is a very selfless love to deprive yourself of calories to keep your older children alive, for example. And like, people in those situations have no good options. But, I can see that from the outside, lawmakers, like, the law is kind of a blunt instrument. So what are you going to do in these contexts, right? So, am I kind of understanding some of the picture here that suddenly German society started going, Well, wait, maybe our laws aren’t great here?
CS: Absolutely. Yeah, that was definitely part of what happened there. It’s also useful to keep in mind that these philosophers of the enlightenment, like, truly, there’s a lot of bad things to be said about the enlightenment, but we can’t deny that they were really interested in how can we make society and human beings better? And there were genuine preoccupations for the causes of, you know, our crimes or our wrongdoing and so on. And this concern of, yeah, are our laws still just? Are they unjust to some people? So there was definitely a lot of that preoccupation that you’re mentioning.
JJF: Mm hmm.
CS: There were German athiciss and scholars and jurists at the time. Frederick the Great is one that was the emperor, and he was, in particular, very preoccupied with this too. And what he did was he decided to decriminalize fornication in the hope that that would lower the rate of infanticide. The reasoning being that women who get pregnant without being married, so illegitimate pregnancies to call them that way, you know, maybe by not making fornication illegal, you would remove the incentive to have them want to get rid of the evidence of their crime, essentially, which, as I think we’ve already made clear, was not even at the heart of most cases of infanticides that they were actually preoccupied with, but that’s another question.
JJF: Oh, okay. So in an effort to try and correct or make the laws more ethical, we have the German I forgot his name, the German Emperor.
CS: Frederick the Great, yeah.
JJF: Thank you. Frederick Great, saying, Okay, well, maybe people are committing infanticide because if you have a baby, it’s pretty obvious that you’ve had sex.
CS: Yeah.
JJF: And if you’ve had sex out of Wedlock then you’ve committed a crime, right? Because sex out of wedlock was also a criminal offense at this time. And so you’d eliminate the baby to eliminate the evidence of the earlier crime. So you commit a later crime to cover the earlier crime.
CS: Exactly.
JJF: But that’s not what people were doing.
CS: Some people, certainly, I’m sure. But when we think of mothers who didn’t have enough food or enough resources to take care of their children, I think there’s something a little bit different at work.
JJF: Right.
CS: It was just I think that was a more straightforward reasoning for enlightenment philosophers and scholars to be preoccupied with. It was a more convenient thing for them to reflect on, I think.
JJF: Right. I could see that, too, because all you have to do is change the law rather than trying to, like, address structural inequalities. And make sure people have food.
CS: Well. And that was a good way for them to say, Well, you know, we’ve removed that problematic law in the first place, making fornication illegal. So now that we’ve taken care of that, you know, if people still commit infanticide, it means there’s something real wrong with them and that we’re legitimate in punishing them for it. So. . .
JJF: Right.
CS: You know, they were compassionate, but not that compassionate. In the end. And there’s something really important that you noted too that I think might be worth saying a word about, which is that, yeah, it was very much regarded as originally a crime and then still as something really bad to get pregnant out of wedlock. Again, despite the fact that many people simply were not allowed to get married at the time. So, in addition to that, there was this component of the reason so many people were more comfortable with the idea of infanticide happening in a married household or even, I assume we’ll talk a bit about abortion later on and so on, was that these reproductive matters were regarded as private matters. And if you publicly punish the woman for them and when she’s married, you’re actually compromising the honor of her husband, as well. So that’s why they were very interested in not disturbing too much the private sphere, as we could call it and seeing it as private, whereas a woman who has engaged in whatever affair or consensual relationship or unconsensual relationship out of wedlock, then that is not private protected sex. It’s public sex, and as such, it can be, everyone can say what they want about it, and it can be punished by law.
JJF: Right, right. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. So if within a marriage, an infanticide or as we’ll talk about later, an abortion happened, they still kind of punished her. But it was, like, a pretty minimal punishment as far as 18th century punishments go. And that was, because that kind of preserves, like, what her husband is the head of the household. This is a private matter, preserves his honor, all that kind of stuff. But if she doesn’t have a husband, even if fornication is now not illegal, it’s still like morally frowned upon. And so that kind of already sets the public up to view this person as a person deserving of punishment.
CS: Yep.
JJF: And to view what’s happened as a public issue because there’s no, like, man to deal with it. I guess. . .
CS: Yep, absolutely. And the other thing I should add to that is these preoccupations for infanticide and, you know, how fair is the punishment that we’re thinking of and how does it apply to unmarried women and so on. This was, sure, partly motivated by considerations about enlightenment and the progress of society, but also not entirely out of the goodness of their heart because there was a strong preoccupation for the depopulation of Germany at the time. You didn’t have enough workers in the workforce. And again, as I’m sure we’ll talk later on, very, very often, reproductive rights are given or taken back to match concerns about population size, workforce, and so on. So there is definitely some of that in the background.
JJF: So we need these babies.
CS: Yeah,
JJF: Like nationally speaking.
CS: And, you know, in a way that mirrors some of today’s preoccupations, legitimate, today we could say legal, white babies and so on. So a kind of preoccupation for a certain kind of baby, obviously.
JJF: Yeah,
CS: Which is very, very wrong, and I do want to flag that, obviously.
JJF: But that has been the history of reproductive rights and reproductive technologies, right?
CS: Absolutely.
JJF: So when we look at the history and we look at people who were forcibly sterilized versus people who were not granted access to abortion, we definitely see a pattern of which babies. . .
CS: do we care about. . .
JJF: . . . nations or people in power want to have live and which babies they don’t want to see exist.
CS: Exactly. So, in that case, Frederick the Great wanted more German workers, essentially. So yeah.
JJF: So we know what Frederick Great thought about this a little bit. We know that this is something that’s been discussed among the German people. So, one thing that philosophers are known for is their study of ethics. We’ve said Kant is an ethicist. But before we dive into Kant on infanticide, what were some of the other ethicists at the time saying about German attitudes towards infanticide or what were other solutions that were proposed to this?
CS: Yeah, there was definitely a lot of talk about it from an ethical or legal standpoint, as well, along with the preoccupation for making sure that laws were as fair and just as possible, which, you know, I do want to credit them for. There’s a lot of people who had that preoccupation.
JJF: Mm hmm.
CS: Some examples of reflections along those lines that actually had some influence on legal code reforms were a preoccupation for properly accounting for the father’s responsibility in paternity. And something that’s really interesting is that unlike. . . in 1794, they updated the Prussian code to reflect, you know, this accountability that the father should have in a pregnancy. And unlike in previous regulations, if it was established that the woman had had relations with multiple men, which was typically a way of denying her support, the new law made all the men accountable for helping the woman along with their family.
JJF: That’s tremendous. Oh, my God, I love.
CS: There were some good ideas being floated around, I think. Again, keeping in mind this background imperative of We want more German babies. But still, you know, let’s not be too cynical. Hippel is someone who definitely, this friend of Kant’s is someone who he had a strong philosophical and legal background, and he definitely reflected a lot on infanticides. He had to preside on the trial of a few infanticides. And you can tell that he’s very conflicted about it. That’s the best way, I think, to describe his complicated stance. He ends up not being as merciful as one would like, I think, towards the poor unmarried women who were convicted in the end but he flagged several inconsistencies in the process, one of which being that, strangely enough, if a woman was on death row and that she received a marriage proposal, she would be released from the death row. So, he flagged that. The idea was truly that, you know, maybe you can be saved through marriage, I guess. And he flags that that’s absurd. He also engages with other reasonings that were simply unacceptable to him that took place in these trials, one of which being the reasoning, and Kant talks about that one a bit, and is also indignated by that one. We’ll talk more about that later, maybe. There was one case at the time. Her first name was Margaret. I forget her last name, unfortunately. It sounded like a very complicated case where she was deemed to have committed infanticide twice, actually. So I’m not too sure of other details in the case, but definitely not a straightforward one. And her defense tried making the argument that because she was unmarried and that the children would not have had citizenship, their death didn’t matter.
JJF: Oh, they weren’t German babies.
CS: No, exactly.
JJF: Right.
CS: So kind of relying on a more way more robust or constraining notion of personhood than I think any ethicists would like. And that is something that Hippel, but also Kant to some degree, very much has a problem with. So these are some, I think, of the ethical questions that were being thrown in in these cases. There’s also this woman, Marianne Herman, speaking of how little we talk about women historically and on those matters. She wrote quite a bit on infanticide. She partook in the genre that we call infanticide fiction, as weird as it may sound. Goethe and Faust also wrote some. What’s special about Herman’s infanticide fiction is that she truly gives a voice to the woman who’s sentenced to death, and she lets her voice all kinds of anger and frustration at the men and the patriarchal society that put her in the position that she is in. So I think that was another really important kind of ethical reflection around how infanticides were handled at the time. And I think that’s probably the type of reflection that you needed to be a woman in that context to feel and to express.
JJF: Yeah.
CS: So I’m not that surprised that not too many people shared something along those lines, but some people definitely did like Herman for instance.
JJF: That’s interesting. And it was a piece of fiction, right? So we’re back to this issue of Oh, well, is that philosophy?
CS: Exactly. Yeah. So I don’t think it’s ever been assigned in a philosophy course. And to be fair, that would be a tough piece to work with.
JJF: Right, for other reasons.
CS: But it is really, really important and interesting, though, on that topic.
JJF: Yeah, and it sounds very much to me like it’s dealing with ethical issues and issues of, like, structural injustice, and, like, let’s try and figure out what are the contributing factors that lead somebody to commit infanticide, right?
CS: Yeah, absolutely. And flagging how absurd it is to punish someone for a crime that they’ve literally been pushed in every way to commit in the end by an unjust society.
JJF: Okay, so we have kind of a plethora of different positions that exist regarding the justness or unjustness of various aspects of the German law regarding infanticide. What did Kant have to say here? ‘Cause he did talk about this, right?
CS: He does talk about it. And to be fair, that’s the other thing that got me to reflect on this issue. It’s a little weird when you’re not familiar with the fact that people were talking a lot about infanticide at the time. You’re wondering, like, why is Kant dedicating, you know, this full section in his Doctrine of Right, on the matter? What a weird preoccupation. And that has actually led some people to call him out maybe more vigorously than needed. Like, he deserves being called out and criticized for so many things. But his interest on that, I think is something that I regard as, his interest in the topic is a positive thing because it means he was interested in a matter of social justice and injustice at the time.
JJF: Yeah, and especially as a gendered crime, which it was.
CS: Absolutely. So he talks about it. He’s definitely very visibly uncomfortable around the topic. ’cause, you know, women and sex.
JJF: Oh, gosh.
CS: Yeah. He talks about sex in places and he’s not super comfortable around that either.
JJF: Yeah.
CS: So I think that participates in the whole tension in his discussion. But I think he does see some of the problems that this society is dealing with. So one thing important to note is that Kant has what we would call today retributivist conception of justice. So that means that he believed in this principle lex talionis which is “an eye for an eye.”
JJF: Mm hmm.
CS: And a lot of people did in his day, and it’s worth keeping in mind maybe that, while today, the connotation of that is awful. At the time, it didn’t mean that if you steal a loaf of bread because you’re hungry, you should be sentenced to paying back what you’ve stolen, maybe by doing jail time, but no one should have the right to kill you or torture you or steal your house because you’ve done that. So it was meant to aim for what was seen as a more just form of punishment.
JJF: And there are still aspects of that that are in our legal system today. The idea of the punishment needing to fit the crime.
CS: Yeah,
JJF: is very much a retributive justice idea.
CS: Absolutely. And there are, of course, different and more compelling conceptions of justice that we can work with today from a more feminist perspective. But yeah, at the time, that was a major paradigm he was working with many others were working with. There was very little questioning of that penalty at the time in general. So the considerations that we have today in terms of seeing that as unacceptable, was not very widely shared. Beccaria was one of the few philosophers in Kant’s day that he had in mind and that he discusses a bit, who was very opposed to that penalty. Other than that, it was pretty standard to assume that it should be kept around, but perhaps reserved for most atrocious crimes or murder in general.
JJF: Mm hmm.
CS: And the question was, do the women convicted for infanticide deserve to be put to death?
JJF: Right.
CS: And where Kant had truly a conundrum there was for him, a woman who was unmarried because of the concentration we’ve talked about around fornication, he was seeing the most dire part of that as you’ve lost your honor, and because of that, you know, what laws still hold? How can you be punished to a point that makes up for losing your honor?
JJF: Mmm.
CS: So he was saying that as these women are placed in an impossible situation because they’ve lost their honor. So what good does it do to punish them? But then on the other hand, he still very much holds to this principle that the sentence should be proportional to the crime, and for that, any kind of murder should be punished by murder. So that’s the dilemma that he’s placed in.
JJF: Okay. So on the one hand, because they’ve lost their honor in the society and the society is, they’re ruined, quote unquote ruined in the society, and that closes a lot of doors.
CS: Mm hm.
JJF: Because that’s already happened. There’s a sense in which they’ve already been punished worse than anything that the state could do to them.
CS: Yeah.
JJF: What purpose does it serve to kill them in retribution for the infanticide. But on the other hand, if we have a, retributive justice in place, we have to kill them because they killed someone.
CS: Yeah.
JJF: So that’s the tension that he’s in, right?
CS: Yep, absolutely. And there’s another passage in a different section where he’s opening the door to, you know, it doesn’t make sense to sentence someone to death if the only reason they’ve killed someone was out of dire necessity. So I think he gives the example of survivors on a boat who just don’t have enough resources for everybody or something along these lines.
JJF: Right.
CS: So he definitely is aware of that kind of tension.
JJF: Right.
CS: In this case, he ends up doubling down on the side of justice and laws as you can expect the men to.
JJF: Oh. Oh, my God. Okay.
CS: So it’s kind of, if anything, it’s like, Oh, he disappointed me again.
JJF: But it’s even worse because it’s like, he knew. Like, he knew what the problem was. He knew that these women were in dire situations making impossible choices. And he was still like, I recognize the problem. But nah.
CS: Yeah. So I think despite being very disappointed in him, I find interesting that he dedicates some space to talk about that and that he acknowledges this fundamental conflict between social norms, social expectations, and the laws as they stand because after all, for him and for so many jurists and ethicists, the laws should reflect the general will of the people. So the laws should make sense in light of social norms. So if your laws are frontally conflicting with social norms, there’s kind of a problem.
JJF: Right.
CS: So he’s aware of that. I don’t think he does a good job at resolving that dilemma, but I found interesting that he gives that some thought and some space in his world.
JJF: Right. And that does set him apart from a lot of other people who may not have been aware of this and who were perfectly happy to punish these unmarried female fornicators.
CS: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
JJF: Without any pause, right? So at least he paused.
CS: Yeah. And I’m aware that’s very, very, very little comfort. I’m definitely not trying to save him in any way. This is more a matter of and here’s why I find this interesting.
JJF: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I think that is interesting, actually. And the fact that he took time to discuss it and lay it out does invite other philosophical critique.
CS: Absolutely.
JJF: And then, because of the patriarchal society we live in and Kant having such a weight in the philosophical canon, this means that today, we can still discover this stuff because he did write about it, which is kind of cool.
CS: Absolutely.
JJF: Okay. So we’ve talked about Kant, and we will probably talk about him again before the end of this episode. But I also want to return to just kind of talking about what was happening in German society at this time, because in your research, you found that there were these kind of medical technologies that were used in the persecution of women for infanticide. So, as we’ve already said, it’s not always clear what’s infanticide and what’s not infanticide, what might be criminal negligence causing death or other confounding factors that lead to the death of an infant. So, like, how did they, quote unquote, determine that it was infanticide?
CS: That was a question that they were also very interested in the jurors, the people involved in the legal system on many levels because they were well aware that in many cases, what could appear to be an infanticide could in fact be a very sad miscarriage. Could be a case where a woman gave birth to a baby that was stillborn. They were aware of what kind of technologies they had access to and what kind of technologies they did not have access to. So what they would do is as part of those trials, they would, the prosecution would typically ask a doctor to proceed to what we could call an autopsy today, to determine whether the deceased baby had already died in utero or not, presumably to avoid wrongful convictions. So, if the woman had had a miscarriage, their reasoning was that the baby would have already been dead when she would have delivered the baby. In which case, she shouldn’t be sentenced for infanticide.
JJF: Right. That makes sense.
CS: So far, so far. And then similarly, again, I think we’ll come back to that later. But while abortion was not permitted at the time, it was not punished in the same way or to the same degree as infanticide.
JJF: Oh, okay.
CS: So again, as long as the doctor’s test was able to determine that the baby had died in utero, the woman was off the hook. So, you know, whether it was a natural death or the result of an abortion, it didn’t matter all that much to the courts at the time. What really mattered is that the baby did not die after being born.
JJF: Right. Okay.
CS: And the test that they were using was in English, you could call it, the lung test, essentially. It’s very gross, and I apologize. During the autopsy,
JJF: Okay everyone brace yourself.
CS: During the autopsy, they were checking if the baby’s lungs were floating in water or not. And the reasoning was that if the lungs floated, the baby had taken a deep breath so had been alive at birth.
JJF: Oh, okay.
CS: And therefore, the mother was held responsible for killing the baby.
JJF: So, if the lungs don’t float, the idea is that the infant died in uterus, which could be a miscarriage/still birth or it might be an induced abortion. Which is not good, but not as bad as infanticide.
CS: Correct. Yeah, that’s not the kind of thing that you would have been prosecuted for to the same degree or with the same consequences.
JJF: Okay, so this is the test they used. It is very gross.
CS: Yeah.
JJF: Did it work?
CS: Well, so you can probably already foresee that there were a few problems with this task. The main one being that there could be many reasons why the lungs would float or not float that, you know, would not necessarily have to do with the baby having been alive or having died. Once an autopsy is performed, a lung is not airtight. You know, there’s many ways in which the lungs could then float or not float that do not have to do with the baby having been born alive or not. What’s more disturbing, though, is that it’s easy to see that and to think, like, Oh, with today’s technologies . . .
JJF: . . . we totally know this doesn’t work.
CS: Yeah. Poor guys, you know, they were just, you know, not as advanced as we are. But, in fact, the doctors and pretty much everybody involved were well aware, even at the time that their test was not reliable or not very reliable.
JJF: Oh, my God. Listeners can’t see my face, but oh, my God. Okay.
CS: Yeah. So it was in practice, that test was mostly used to confirm the convictions that the court wanted to uphold or to protect the women that the court wanted to protect.
JJF: So they would, like, manipulate the tests, kind of.
CS: Yeah, or use it in a purely instrumental way.
JJF: Like, not perform the test in certain cases.
CS: Yeah.
JJF: Right.
CS: Or perform expecting a certain result and go ahead with that.
JJF: Okay.
CS: Which actually reminded me of something that is much closer to your research preoccupations, but that weirdly reminded me of AI detectors, as we have them at the time. They’re so unreliable, as far as I can tell, at least.
JJF: Yeah, no, they are.
CS: I feel like the few cases where I hear they’re being used is when we know exactly what the outcome we want to show is, and we know that despite being unreliable, they will work in this specific case or they will produce the result that we wanted to produce. Just the other day, I very sadly had to talk to a student about AI generated papers and so on. The first thing that that student told me was, Oh, let me run it through an AI detector.
JJF: I will show you I didn’t generate this with AI, yes.
CS: So I think we give ourselves as, you know, however technologically advanced we want to see ourselves as a society. We give ourselves lots of tests and lots of technologies that we know from the onset are very flawed.
JJF: Yeah,
CS: So, you know, may be used in another one that is very relevant today, I think is those menstrual cycle trackers that you can have on your phone that I think there are legitimate fears that now they can be used to support the conviction of someone who may or may not have gotten an abortion, but is the test really going. . . Is the tracker really going to indicate that?
JJF: No, they can’t indicate the tracker can’t tell the difference between a miscarriage or an abortion or you just putting the information in wrong or fluctuations in your cycle or what have you.
CS: Yep.
JJF: Yeah. No, I think that’s a really good point, of course, you’re telling me that they knew these tests were flawed, and I’m thinking like, if they knew they were flawed, why the hell did they use them? But I think your examples are really good to remind us that quite often we rely on these technologies to confirm what we already want to be the case rather than to necessarily tell us what’s actually going on. That we’re no different than they were in that respect. That’s what we’re using these tools to do, as well, is it’s a confirmation bias, right? It’s feeding back to us what we want.
CS: Absolutely.
JJF: Rather than helping us discover the truth.
CS: Yeah. So in some way, the problem is not that their technologies were not advanced enough to come up with a test that would have been perfectly reliable. I think that test, first of all, just does not exist even today. And second, they were, like we are, aware of the flaws and the bias that are built in, and they were using it to serve their ends like we do today, unfortunately, with different things.
JJF: So you have already talked about how these tests seem to specifically be trying to allow us to determine when an infanticide happened as opposed to a miscarriage or an abortion. But you’ve already kind of hinted that abortion, while not as bad as infanticide was still, like, not legal at this time. So can you talk a little bit about German attitudes towards abortion and how the laws treated abortion?
CS: So it is really, really interesting. And I think the next step that I want to give some more thorough research and thought on. So abortion was also criminalized, but it was typically not prosecuted to the same degree as infanticide. So jurors were aware that it was way more difficult to prove in a court of law. As they were seeing it, the main difference between abortions, especially self-inflicted abortions and miscarriage was a matter of intention, which from back then to today is very, very hard to establish.
JJF: Yeah.
CS: The abortions that were prosecuted to different degrees, I think what was of more interest to them on that matter was serial abortion practitioners, like witches, would be something that we could talk about in a different episode.
JJF: So it was more about people providing the abortion rather than the pregnant person getting an abortion.
CS: Yeah, I’m pretty sure. And the stakes were also very different, and that’s something that we sometimes don’t fully realize partly because of the way the pro-life discourses unfold today. Where we hear these talks about life and about murder. And at the time, the church actually did not systematically regard abortion as murder. So fetal life was only considered human life after what was called the process of ensoulment. So when you had what they call quickening or moving fetus, which depending on the sex of the fetus, they actually estimated would occur between the 40th day and the 90th day of pregnancy. So yeah.
JJF: Isn’t it like female souls or it’s harder to get the female soul into the body or something.
CS: I actually like that, you know, I think it means we take a little bit longer to mature in and, you know. Yeah. So that’s why I think abortion and infanticide were regarded as fundamentally different. The stakes was not the same. Murder was never seen as a consideration when it came to handling abortion. And then the other thing is that abortion, like pregnancy, for the reasons we’ve discussed earlier, was perceived as a private matter. So the aggressive prosecution of abortion would have been perceived in that context as an intrusion into family life for women who were married.
JJF: So this is if the person was married, yeah.
CS: Yeah.
JJF: Okay.
CS: So married women, again, were much less likely to be prosecuted for that in order to avoid intruding into the husband’s privacy and interfering with his rights or something like that.
JJF: His rights.
CS: Yeah.
JJF: Yeah. Okay. Okay, although I mean, I could dump all over the “his rights’ part, but I do think there’s something quite positive here, which is this idea that the court recognized something that I think is quite common sense, which is that you can’t tell the intention, right?
CS: Yeah.
JJF: So, correct me if I’m wrong listeners, but I think it’s something like one in three or one in four pregnancies can end in a miscarriage or medically a spontaneous abortion, right? And so, with those kind of stats, I think it’s really cool that the court just kind of recognized, Look, we can’t really prosecute this because we can’t really tell when it’s a self-induced abortion versus when it is a miscarriage. And so let’s just be practical about this and not prosecute it. And then, yeah, the whole church rhetoric, and I do remember reading a thing about how that’s changed very drastically, particularly in the United States, though not exclusively in the United States to views about fetal life and fetal souls and stuff like that, that were not typically widespread Christian views only a couple hundred years ago.
CS: Yeah, and I do find that fascinating. Discourses around life and around abortion can very much evolve. But I think what’s striking to me is we think of pro-life views as being deep rooted into, you know, traditions or traditional views on life and so on. And it is mind blowing to learn that they’re actually fairly recent and. . .
JJF: they’re fairly modern.
CS: Yeah. So it is quite interesting.
JJF: That is really interesting. Okay, so they didn’t have any kind of medical tests to tell the difference between a miscarriage or an abortion.
CS: No,
JJF: which we still don’t now.
CS: Exactly.
JJF: So yeah, I think this is so fascinating, not only because we can think about how recent or modern some pro-life rhetoric is. But also, as I said, we don’t have medical technologies that distinguish between miscarriage and abortion today. So can you talk a little bit about why you think this history is important or how it might inform our attitudes now?
CS: Yeah, and I think that’s a really important question to reflect on in the current context, too. It’s interesting because while reasons to prosecute abortions at the time seem very different than the ones we hear of today, again, along the lines of today, abortion is murder kind of thing. There are actually commonalities that are interesting to reflect on. So first of all, if we think of the way in which abortion and infanticide seemed much more acceptable all of a sudden within a married household because that is their private business, the husband’s private business in particular. So that’s awfully reminiscent of, first of all, how a lot of politicians who are publicly against abortion in private have been known to pay their mistresses to go seek an abortion.
JJF: Mm hmm. Mm hm.
CS: And that reasoning in general, is also coming into play today where women are dispossessed from control over their own bodies and reproductive rights, whether it’s for the benefit of a husband, a lineage or of society. Just the other day, my students were mentioning to me that there are these nasty things circulating on TikTok, I think, along the lines of Your Body Mye Choice, if I remember what?
JJF: Yes. Yeah.
CS: So yeah, so that deciding that something is private matter and bring that back to the husband’s business, I think is very consistent with today how we handle some of these considerations. One of the major Canadian cases that led to the decriminalization of abortion was the Chantelle Daigle case in Quebec in 1989, where her former partner got a court order against her to prevent her from seeking an abortion.
JJF: Oh Wow.
CS: And in the end, the court, I don’t remember exactly the succession of events, but it’s a fascinating case, and the judgment was favorable to her and was very much set a precedent in terms of, yeah, no one else can decide if you want to seek an abortion if you’re going to get it or not. So I think there’s this common thread. And then the other important element to our reflection when we bring these matters up to today is that it’s important to keep in mind that reproductive rights are not something that we discover or even something that we build and can then enjoy as we please. They are sometimes granted or earned, but also sometimes taken back for reasons that go well beyond ideological considerations about what counts as human life or even considerations about having autonomies over one’s own body.
JJF: Yeah.
CS: And that’s something that I was really happy to be able to relate to preoccupations that Adrianne Rich, who’s a wonderful feminist philosopher, has investigated quite a bit. She has talked about abortion and infanticide and motherhood a lot. She points that changes in abortion legislation and birth control options one way or another, no matter which way we look at it, tend to track a political desire for cheap labor when abortion suddenly becomes permissible, like when it was legalized for the very first time in the USSR in 1920. And then on the other hand, becomes harder to get when there’s suddenly a concern for decreasing birth rates, like we can observe in the moment at the moment in the United States, for instance.
JJF: Makes me think that over about the last ten or 15 years in Canada, we’ve had more and more rhetoric that I’ve seen in mainstream media talking about what we need to do to get women to breed.
CS: Right, yep.
JJF: And so I am vigilant and concerned whether or not that will be attached to anti-abortion pro-life rhetoric, because I think that’s a really important point, and it’s a point we’ve made already, but I think it’s worth restating that the way in which reproductive technologies and reproductive rights are used, often in the service of state and national interests, right? So pro-abortion when we need more female laborers who aren’t doing childcare and instead working in factories or working in other industry. And then anti-abortion rhetoric when we’re concerned about declining birth rates. And we’ve already talked about which babies governments sometimes or quite often promote over others, right? Like good German babies in the case of the 18th century.
CS: And on that note, there were actually far more German laws that got established much later on in Germany’s history during the Nazi Germany period, more specifically so abortion became straight up illegal and much more severe criminal charge. However, as you pointed out, there is always this concern, especially in the context of Nazi Germany, of which babies are we talking about? So if you were a Jewish woman or a woman of color, nobody had a problem with you seeking an abortion. They only had a problem if it was a white German woman. So the way in which we use the tests that we have, the technologies that we have the way in which we even apply the laws that we give ourselves, I think, indicate that none of that is accidental. None of that is, you know, just a way in which society has progressed or regressed.
JJF: Or just like, Oh, the technological tools just don’t work that well. Like, no, we know they don’t work well, and we’re using this anyway.
CS: And I think that’s all really important to keep in mind when assessing the cynicism of the German population and jurists regarding the failures of that lung test that they were using. That test was very much there to serve a purpose, a political purpose. And similarly, without getting too cynical about our democracies today because, you know, got to still think that we can do something about it, of course. And without also minimizing the concerns of those who, for instance, might be worried about human lives getting lost in abortion, I do think it’s important to pause and to reflect on the deeper motivations that some people in power may have in permitting or denying certain procedures with respect to reproductive rights, just like was the case in 18th century Germany.
JJF: I want to thank you so much for speaking with us today about Kantian ethics, 18th century German attitudes towards infanticide, and these flawed, politically advantageous medical technologies. Is there anything else that you want to leave our listeners with today?
CS: So, I was wondering what I could say to wrap this up, and there’s this great overused, maybe, but still great passage from Simone de Beauvoir where she flags that, “Never forget that it takes only one political, economic or religious crisis for women’s rights to be put in jeopardy. Those rights are never to be taken for granted. You must remain vigilant throughout your life”. And for me, that really tied into Adrienne Rich reflections as well, who also points out that there’s no guarantee that a liberal policy will not become an oppressive one so long as women do not have absolute decision power over the use of our bodies. So I think where these reflections should have a purpose for us beyond the historical interest that I’m taking in them along with other nerds is what do they reveal about the ways in which these technologies and these policies are applied to target certain people in particular, and yeah, how consciously are they applied with respect to that, I think our preoccupations that should still inform us today.
JJF: I want to thank Charlotte again for sharing her research on Kantian ethics, 18th century attitudes towards infanticide, and the use of technology in 18th century infanticide court cases with us today. And thank you, listener, for joining me for another episode of Cyborg Goddess. This podcast is created by me, Jennifer Jill Fellows, and it is part of the Harbinger Media Network. Music is provided by Epidemic Sound. You can follow us on X, (formerly Twitter,) BlueSky or follow me on Mastodon. Social media links are all in the show notes. Until next time, everyone. Bye.