A Genealogy of Fraternal Alliance and Medicalized Abortion: The Hippocratic Oath in Roe v. Wade

This article advances a genealogy of the Hippocratic oath in Roe v. Wade. It excavates and analyzes the role that the Hippocratic oath plays in the majority opinion’s grounding of a right to abortion in the privacy of the physician-patient relation. I show that the classical Greek oath, which the opinion quotes and interprets at length, is really about a different relationship—not the one a physician has with a patient but the one a physician has with a patient’s guardian, usually a husband. Restored to the reproductive politics of classical Greece that Roe carries forward in its opinion, the Hippocratic oath figures a tacit alliance between two groups, male physicians and male heads of households, for maintaining the inequality of women and the political rights of men, equal to each other, through sexual and reproductive control. What happens when we take this as the origin story baked into Roe? The problem is no longer simply that the ruling grants a physician, rather than a patient, the authority to terminate a pregnancy, as long argued, but that this authority, at bottom, really belongs to another man. The article complicates the feminist critique of the decision’s focus on the privacy of the physician-patient relation by showing what this privacy actually consists of: a foundational scene of male collusion and female inequality. A new and suspicious practice of medicine allies with an established practice of marriage and guardianship to secure the androcentric order that will serve them both. The interests of professional medicine and patriarchy are impossible to disentangle at the heart of Roe. The majority opinion provides an etiology for Roe’s own overturning in Dobbs.