Last week we talked about the importance of respecting your hormones and we’ve shared in the past how the birth control pill can have an effect on hormones and in turn menstruation. As part of our taking #femininetothemax campaign, we thought it would be a good time to delve in to this topic a little bit deeper by exploring the social history of the pill. Over a quarter of American women use it as their primary birth control method, liberated by the ability to assert control over their bodies, but few know that the birth control pill represents a history of institutionalized population control, racism and sexism.
First marketed in the U.S. in 1960, the pill, and its advertising, stood for women’s empowerment and the ability to regulate her own body. Sex, reproduction, and pleasure had been separated. For some, the pill was a catalyst for the women’s sexual revolution; for couples, it was a miracle drug that allowed for family planning; and for some, it meant being subject to chemical testing without consent. What was never advertised was how trials were conducted, what data was ignored, or who the test subjects were; the conception story of the birth control pill is actually an untold story of women’s oppression.
“The irony of the pill is that it was tested on women, specifically women of color— many of whom were forced to undergo sterilization — before later being marketed predominately to white women in America as a symbol of independence,” writes Mic journalist Marcie Bianco. The two American doctors credited for creating the pill, Dr. Gregory Pincus and Dr. John Rock, she points out, effectively sterilized hundreds of women, from non-consenting psychiatric patients at the Worcester State Hospital to destitute Puerto Rican women living in the housing projects of Rio Piedras, by testing variations of the pill on them, taking advantage of their destitution, lack of education, and inadequate governmental protections.
According to PBS, one of the reasons Puerto Rico was chosen as a place to conduct trials was that “Pincus knew that if he could demonstrate that the poor, uneducated, women of Puerto Rico could follow the Pill regimen, then women anywhere in the world could too…By showing Puerto Rican women could successfully use oral contraceptives, he could quiet critics’ concerns that oral contraceptives would be too “complicated” for women in developing nations and American inner cities to use.”
Even in the developmental process of the pill, gender and racial biases were present. “The pill has functioned as a technique not only for controlling reproduction but also for producing and controlling gender and race,” writes Beatriz Preciado, author of Testo Junkie, a book about gender in the age of pharmacology. A brief history of birth control in the U.S.exposes several sociocultural and religious biases that made acceptance of the pill difficult. For example, in 1967 African American activists accused Planned Parenthood of perpetrating genocide by providing the pill in poor, minority neighborhoods.
Although it comes with a checkered past, the pill, and contraceptives overall, are generally a priority on developmental agendas and aid programs because of their ability to reduce endemic poverty and improve gender equality. The goal behind foreign aid family planning schemes is that contraceptives allows women to limit the number of children they have and for young girls to stay in school longer, becoming educated enough to join the workforce, increasing their economic value in the household and community. Critics label contraceptive provision as ‘population control’, and in a way it is, but the issue boils down to choice. Giving women the resources, ability, and education to control and reclaim their bodies is the first step towards empowerment, which is crucial for them to unlock their potential.
Since 2012, Melinda Gates has been championing an international campaign to provide birth control to an additional 120 million women around the world by 2020. “We can’t do the top-down planning that happened in the world in the 1970s, where we told women what to do,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “It was about population control, it was about coercion.”
These days, it’s about choice and education though. As a company that has dedicated itself to educating women about healthy tampon and pad product options, to support one of the most important reproductive processes, menstruation, we want to make sure our audience is aware of related issues like birth control. We believe in doing what’s natural and that might mean something different to you. We’re open to that and hearing your perspective so don’t hesitate to share it with us down below.
References:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/pill/peopleevents/e_puertorico.html/
https://mic.com/articles/113022/the-dark-history-of-birth-control-that-you-haven-t-heard#.IO21Kui4v
https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/09/25/testo-junkie-sex-drugs-and-biopolitics-in-the-pharmacopornographic-era-by-beatriz-preciado/
http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/health-info/a-brief-history-of-birth-control/
http://www.familyplanning2020.org/