Discusses “Nations are Built of Babies” by Cynthia Comacchio, about the campaign to minimize infant and maternal mortality in early 20th-century Ontario, Canada.
The Canadian medical profession utilized science experts to try to implement what became known as “scientific motherhood.” The effort to socially construct “scientific motherhood” was all about moulding Canadian families to be compatible with industrial capitalism. By teaching and regulating women’s “child-rearing’ expertise, male elites believed that they could engineer a society that served their interests. Thus, all of this was really about the enforcement of certain ideological values and the implementation of social control.