Amanda (Amanda Prestigiacomo)
speaker
1,029 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Amanda (Amanda Prestigiacomo)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Until the late 1800s, women healers in Western Europe and the U.S.
provided abortions and trained other women to do so without legal prohibitions.
Across the colonies and later across the United States, reproductive care remained largely in women's hands.
Childbirth, miscarriage management, contraception, fertility regulation, and abortion weren't separate medical specialties.
They were part of a continuum of care.
Midwives cared for women through every stage of reproductive life.
In many communities, these experts were black women.
In the South, enslaved black midwives delivered babies for enslaved women and often the white families as well.
Indigenous communities maintain their own rich traditions of reproductive knowledge, including childbirth practices and fertility regulations that had developed over centuries.
Their expertise was extraordinary.
Yet their authority was limited.
Enslaved black women could be trusted to deliver a child safely into the world while having almost no legal control over whether they themselves would bear children.
Under slavery, women's reproductive capacity became an economic asset owned by enslavers.
Reproduction itself became part of the machinery of American enslavement.
This contradiction, relying on these women's labor and expertise while denying them authority over their own bodies, is in many ways the story of America.
But suddenly, in the middle of the 1800s, American medicine was undergoing a revolution.
Doctors wanted something they had never fully possessed, professional authority and economic monopoly.
In order to get those things, medicine needed to be organized, standardized, licensed.
In order to rule people out, you had to have a licensing process to rule people in.
In 1847, male physicians founded the American Medical Association.
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