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  • Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planningby Manon Parry
  • Elizabeth Siegel Watkins
Manon Parry. Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning. Critical Issues in Health and Medicine. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2013. xii + 192 pp. Ill. $24.95 (978-0-8135-6151-6).

In 2000, I discovered that the 1916 Lois Weber film, Where Are My Children—which tackled the subjects of birth control and abortion—would be shown on television one time only, on a Sunday night at ten thirty on TCM. Not being a cable subscriber, I begged a friend to videotape the broadcast for me, so that I could play the VHS tape in my undergraduate course on “Sex, Population, and Birth Control.” I was surprised that I had not previously encountered this pioneering film; I am happy to report that it is given its due in Manon Parry’s Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning.

Broadcasting Birth Controlviews the history of the birth control movement through the lens of the media, from film and radio to television and internet [End Page 145]websites. The author maintains that this expanded pool of primary source materials sheds further light on the motives and methods of birth control advocates in the twentieth century. She also contends that the participation of communications theorists in the development of media productions with contraceptive content influenced the strategies of the birth control movement as well as discourses on the ethics and effectiveness of media messaging about family planning.

The narrative begins, as most birth control movement histories do, with Margaret Sanger and her challenges to the Comstock law in the United States. It then traces the efforts of Sanger and her colleagues and their allies in the film industry to use the silver screed to promote birth control in the 1910s and 1920s. In the 1930s, birth control advocates shifted their attention to radio broadcasting. While movie censors limited the prospects for educating people about birth control through the medium of entertainment films, the regulation of radio content actually increased opportunities over the airwaves, because of efforts to maintain an educational mission alongside commercial entertainment.

After covering the terrain of film and radio, the next chapter focuses primarily on television, addressing a wide range of topics in the 1950s through the 1970s, from concerns about overpopulation, to the development of public service advertisements for family planning, to abortion as a subject of both documentaries and dramas. The author uses these episodes to illustrate the debates within Planned Parenthood about how best to use mass media to convey the desired pro-contraception method. Fearful of offending network sponsors, Planned Parenthood took a cautious approach to the development of TV messaging in the United States, avoiding the use of humor, sexual references, and emotional appeals, in spite of media studies that showed these to be persuasive communication tools.

The book then takes up the birth control movement outside the United States, focusing first on the media associated with international family planning efforts undertaken by American advocates and then on indigenous productions that incorporated contraceptive topics. The author describes the failure of the films produced by the former to engage local audiences in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and contrasts these flops with the success of homegrown soap operas in capturing the interest of vast numbers of viewers in Mexico and India. The story lines of these television serials centered on family and sexual relationships; it is perhaps not surprising that viewers were receptive to birth control messages when presented in the context of sex. The final chapter returns to American television, which had given up all pretense of prudery by the end of the twentieth century, and interrogates messages about sex and contraception on a number of shows ranging from the sitcom Friendsto the reality show Teen Mom.

Historians of birth control and reproductive rights will find much that is familiar in Broadcasting Birth Control. The analysis of the different media productions—film, radio, television, and websites—reinforces our understanding of the efforts undertaken by family planning advocates to bring contraception to the people. Along the way, we learn about the development of...

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