We Must Not Allow a Contraception Gap: Planned Parenthood's Campaign for New Birth Control and Feminist Health Activism in the 1990s

In 1990, Planned Parenthood Federation of America launched a nationwide public relations drive called the Campaign for New Birth Control in reaction to reports that Americans were being deprived of contraceptives available in other parts of the world. This article will use Planned Parenthood's Campaign for New Birth Control as a case study of how reproductive rights activists organized around emerging contraceptive technologies in the late twentieth century. It will discuss how Planned Parenthood tried to rally a diverse range of constituencies around the notion of a "contraception gap." This construct was based on the presumption that developing new contraceptive technologies was unmistakably feminist because it gave women more options to control their fertility. However, other actors involved in the New Birth Control campaign believed the "contraception gap" was an inappropriate strategy for mobilizing broad support for birth control innovation.

Contraception in the prepill era

Although medical history has documented the desire to control fertility since ancient times, safe and effective contraception did not exist until this century and has not been equally available to all people. Strong moral sentiments, economic and social class factors, religious beliefs, familial and gender relations, and political as well as legal constraints have often limited the ability of physicians in favor of contraception to provide advice and methods of birth control to their patients. By the early 1900s, a constellation of factors--in particular, the large influx of poor immigrants, and feminist groups advocating women's rights--helped to move forward a birth-control movement in this country and abroad. In the early 20th century, Margaret Sanger became one of the most avid proponents of contraception in the United States. By 1950, she and Katharine McCormick had contracted with biologist Gregory Pincus to develop an effective birth control pill. A collaborative effort by Pincus and other researchers led to trials of the pill in Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Mexico between 1956 and 1957, which provided the basis for an application to the Food and Drug Administration for approval of the first oral contraceptive.

The role of contraceptive supply and demand in Mexican fertility decline: evidence from a microdemographic study

This paper uses retrospective life history data to assess the impact of family planning services on contraceptive use in a rural Mexican township. Between 1960 and 1990 contraceptive use rose and fertility declined dramatically. Both contraceptive supply and demand factors were influential in these trends. The start of the government-sponsored family planning programme in the late 1970s was associated with a sharp rise in female sterilization and use of the IUD. However, once we controlled for the changing socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the sample, the presence of family planning services had no significant effect on the likelihood that women used modern reversible methods compared to traditional methods. Men and women expressed concerns about the safety of modern methods such as the pill and the IUD. Efforts to increase modern contraceptive use should place greater emphasis on communicating the safety of these methods and improving the quality of services.

From population control politics to chemicals: the WHO as an intermediary organization in contraceptive development

Studies of laboratory work have rarely focused on the role of intermediary organizations in developing R&D activities. Most studies focus on a single university-based research laboratory or an industrial R&D unit. Moreover the rejection by social constructivist scholars of universalistic, deterministic explanations of the development of science and technology has led to an overemphasis on the local features of scientific and technological work. Based on a case study of the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in contraceptive R&D, this paper suggests that an analysis of the role of intermediary organizations enables us to go beyond a too-narrow focus on the micro-sociological dynamics of laboratory work, to include the macro- and meso-sociological dimensions of science and technology. First, a focus on intermediary organizations enables us to learn more about the manner in which locally specific laboratory cultures are transformed into translocal research practices. This paper shows how literary technologies, and to an even greater extent material technologies, are important tools in accomplishing standardization of local laboratory cultures. Second, a focus on intermediary organizations enables us to study how concerns that go beyond the laboratory--in this case, population control policies and the agenda of the WHO--help to shape laboratory practices.

Contraception and abortion in the Greco-Roman world

The author discusses the validity of the claim that, in Antiquity, effective contraceptives and abortifacients were available, were widely used, and their use was responsible for the decline of population in certain periods. After reviewing the maneuvers and drugs used for those purposes, the author concludes that ancient physicians did not have at their disposal effective contraceptives and abortifacients other than those that acted mechanically. In view of the danger associated with the mechanical induction of abortion, the ineffectiveness of pharmacological agents, and the limitations of mechanical contraceptives, it is concluded that drugs and other means of inducing abortion and contraception had a very limited impact on population in Antiquity.

Infibulation, population control, and the medical profession

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