A recurring question raised by my libertarian and classical liberal friends is: how can we persuade others of the value of freedom? One answer is to especially seek conversation with those who strongly object to losing their freedom in some part of their life that they value. As I read the obituary of Norma Swenson, co-author of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, I thought I recognized her as a libertarian fellow-traveler. She passionately sought for herself and other women to have greater freedom in making their own medical decisions.
Today, born out of outrage over the government’s over-reaching Covid controls, a “health freedom” movement has grown and organized, seeking more broadly (though not always consistently) for all adults to be able to make their own medical decisions.
Libertarians and classical liberals should let those seeking health freedom know that we are with them, in principle and in practice. Many of my own blog entries defend health freedom, for instance here and here.
(p. B11) Norma Swenson was working to educate women about childbirth, championing their right to have a say about how they delivered their babies, when she met the members of the collective that had put out the first rough version of what would become the feminist health classic “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
. . .
She . . . [knew] quite a bit about the medical establishment, the paternalistic and condescending behavior of male doctors (only 6 percent of incoming medical students were women in 1960) and the harmful effect such behavior had on women’s health. She had lived it, during the birth of her daughter in 1958.
. . .
She would go on to help make “Our Bodies, Ourselves” a global best seller.
. . .
The author Barbara Ehrenreich called it a manifesto of medical populism.
. . .
It was her daughter’s birth that had made Ms. Swenson an activist. She wanted to deliver the baby naturally, without medication. Her decision was such an anomaly that residents at the Boston Lying-In Hospital gathered to watch her labor. It went swimmingly.
But Ms. Swenson, who was in a 12-bed ward, was surrounded by women who were suffering. They were giving birth according to the practices of the era: with a dose of scopolamine, a drug that induced so-called twilight sleep and hallucinations, followed by a shot of Demerol, an opioid.
She remembered the women screaming, trying to climb out of their beds, calling for their mothers and cursing their husbands before being knocked out by the Demerol, their babies delivered by forceps.
It was barbaric, she thought. “These women weren’t being helped,” she said in 2018, “they were being controlled.”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated June 16, 2025, and has the title “Norma Swenson, an Author of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ Dies at 93.”)
The most recent edition of the book co-authored by Norma Swenson is:
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Atria Books, 2011.