For the past two decades anti-abortionists in the Global North have been aggressively instrumentalising disability in order to undermine women’s social autonomy, asserting, falsely, there is an insuperable conflict between disability rights and reproductive rights. The utilisation of disability in struggles over abortion access is not new, it has a history dating back to the interwar era. Indeed, decades before anti-abortionists’ campaign, feminists invoked disability to expand access to safe abortion. This paper examines the feminist eugenics in the first organisation dedicated to liberalising restrictive abortion laws, the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), established in England in 1936. ALRA played a vital role in the passage of the Abortion Act 1967 (or the Act) that greatly expanded the grounds for legal abortion, a hugely important gain for women in Britain and beyond seeking legal, safe abortions. In addition, the Act permitted eugenic abortion, which also had transnational effects: within a decade, jurisdictions in numerous Commonwealth countries passed abortion laws that incorporated the Act’s eugenics clause, sometimes verbatim. This essay analyses ALRA’s role in codifying eugenics in the Abortion Act 1967 and argues that from the outset, ALRA was simultaneously a feminist and eugenist association. Initially, ALRA prioritized their feminist commitment to ‘voluntary motherhood’ in their campaign whereas starting in the 1940s, they subordinated feminism to negative eugenics, a shift that was simultaneously strategic and a reflection of genuine concern to prevent the birth of children with disabilities.

Variable-Value axiologies avoid Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion while satisfying some weak instances of the Mere Addition principle. We apply calibration methods to two leading members of the family of Variable-Value views conditional upon: first, a very weak instance of Mere Addition and, second, some plausible empirical assumptions about the size and welfare of the intertemporal world population. We find that such facts calibrate these two Variable-Value views to be nearly totalist, and therefore imply conclusions that should seem repugnant to anyone who opposes Total Utilitarianism only due to the Repugnant Conclusion.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw dramatic new developments in climatic medicine, particularly the institutionalisation of thinking about tropical hygiene. There were also more limited efforts to understand how hygiene theories should be applied in a polar environment. Studying the British National Antarctic Expedition (1901–1904), led by Robert Falcon Scott, helps us understand how these practices had both similarities and differences from applications of hygiene in other contexts. The expedition offers unique insights into debates about hygiene, environment, and health because of the important, and well documented, role that medics, naval officers and scientists played in organising logistical arrangements for the journey to Antarctica. In analysing the writings of expedition members and organisers, this paper examines the ways that the universal tools of hygiene theories were applied and developed in a polar environment. Many of the most acute threats seemed to come not from the outside environment but from the explorers’ supplies and equipment. There was general agreement on many issues. Yet the expedition’s organisers, medics and leadership had numerous arguments about the best way to preserve or restore health. These disagreements were the product of both competing medical theories about the cause of disease and the importance of embodied (and somewhat subjective) observations in establishing the safety of foods, atmospheres and environments in this period.

Debates about cultural participation of persons with disabilities within legal and socio-legal scholarship and within disability studies tend to remain disconnected. This article brings legal analysis and other academic disciplines into a critical dialogue. It sheds light on how the right to cultural participation is understood from the bottom up, building on a study carried out across Europe. Participants in this study perceived opportunities to participate in, and to contribute to, arts and culture in ways that are consistent with the human rights approach to disability as expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and as central to the concept of inclusive equality. Cultural participation was also understood as intrinsic to the humanity of all people, as vital to inclusion in mainstream life, as capable of communicating experiences or identities not otherwise represented, and as potentially transformative of art-forms and ultimately, of society.

This article studies the impact caused by the success and dissemination of Broussais’ theories on the use of leeches as a medical supply on Spanish–French trade relations, as well as its consequences for the Spanish market between 1821 and the 1860s. Analysing the documents produced by the different public administrations, together with newspaper and archival sources in both Spain and France and the literature and legislation of that period, allows us to understand the evolution of this trade and the heavy impact it had on the autochthonous population of this animal resource. The article reveals how, at the beginning of the 1820s, leeches became an important medical supply and how the demand for them increased significantly. This gave rise to a trade relation between Spain and France that led to the overexploitation of the resource, the issuing of regulations on the matter, and the search for technological solutions to increase the production of leeches.

From a gender historical perspective, labour precarity constitutes a long-term phenomenon. Women's work represents a privileged observatory to understand how instability and precarity also characterised the cycle of economic and industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s. The article compares the conditions of female factory workers with those of home-based workers, a traditionally invisible category of workers, who between the 1960s and 1970s promoted demonstrations and protests with the support of trade unions, women's associations and local institutions. Changes in the subjectivity of women workers and homeworkers, whose demands often came together and gave rise to joint protests, not only became part of broader discussions on the relationship between industrial crisis and precariousness, but also generated discourses on specific forms of work that are now central to debates on flexible/precarious work such as part-time work.

This article explores the development of hydrological infrastructure in colonial Hong Kong between the late 1930s and the late 1960s. Utilizing archival sources in Hong Kong and London, it shows how this infrastructure fundamentally reshaped Hong Kong’s geography. By way of concrete catchwaters and metal pipes, both ‘green’ and ‘urban’ Hong Kong became counter-intuitively interconnected. This interconnection created both unintended consequences and novel opportunities for colonial governance, driving forward natural conservation, state intervention into rural society and the development of new carceral institutions. Exploring these developments provides pivotal insight into the urban history of Hong Kong, with implications for global studies of historical urban political ecology.

This essay argues that scrofula was one of several disorders, including gout, rickets, and venereal disease, that were ‘rebranded’ as hereditary in response to broader cultural changes that took place during the Restoration and eighteenth century in England. While the purposes of scrofula’s recategorisation were more political than medical, they resulted in this heretofore relatively obscure childhood ailment assuming a new prominence within both medical and popular discourses of the period. Scrofula became both emblem and proof of the links between sexual promiscuity, financial profligacy, and physiological degeneration, its symbolic status reinforced by the legal and moral language used to model processes of hereditary transmission. By likening the inheritance of scrofula to the inheritance of original sin—or, more commonly, to the inheritance of a ‘docked entail’ or damaged estate—eighteenth-century writers and artists not only made this non-inherited ailment into a sign of catastrophic hereditary decline; they also paved the way for scrofula to be identified as a disease of aristocratic vice, even though its association with crowded, unsanitary living conditions likely made it more common among the poor. By the same token, financial models of disease inheritance facilitated a bias toward paternal transmission, with scrofula often portrayed as passing, like a title or an estate, from father to son rather than from mother to daughter.