"Nations Are Built of Babies" documents a national campaign by Ontario physicians to reduce infant and maternal mortality in the early twentieth century. Armed with a secure faith in science and aided by the increasingly important position of experts in Canadian society, the medical profession tackled the "national tragedy" of infant and maternal mortality by advocating "scientific motherhood." Canadian mothers were believed to be handicapped by an ignorance that could be remedied only through expert tutoring and supervision of child-rearing duties.

Working within a Marxist-feminist framework, Cynthia Comacchio demonstrates that the campaign was part of a conscious plan to modernize Canadian families to meet the ideological imperatives of industrial capitalism. Doctors reasoned that if infants could be saved and their physical, mental, and moral health regulated, the benefits in socio-economic terms would more than offset any individual or state investment.

Cynthia Comacchio's research focuses on the history of children/childhood and youth in Canada, late 19th to 21st centuries. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of a Modern Canada, 1920-50 (WLU Press, 2008) and Ring Around the Maple: Settler Children in Canada, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (WLU Press, 2024).

Cynthia R. Comacchio's profile page

"A fascinating story of government involvement in people's lives, internecine rivalries in the medical profession (especially between doctors and nurses), and the prominent role played in the ongoing debate by such prominent women as Helen MacMurchy and Charlotte Whitton." Gerald J. Stortz, Canadian Book Review Annual
"A welcome addition to the field of Canadian medical history ... The book is a revealing analysis of a major public health campaign that lasted for decades because it took so long to get to the underlying causes of infant mortality. Most of all, Comacchio's work is another reminder of the wider social and economic determinants of health, an important conclusion that is increasingly guiding our health care system in the 1990s." Paul Bator, Ontario History
"A compelling study of the limitations as well as the achievements of the child welfare campaign." Molly Ladd-Taylor, Canadian Historical Review