The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women's Bodies

2. “Birth Control for a Nation”: The IUD as Technoscientific Biopower

2 “Birth Control for a Nation”: The IUD as Technoscientific Biopower At the first international conference on the intrauterine device sponsored by the Population Council in 1962 in New York City, conference chairman Alan Guttmacher articulated the need for a new kind of contraceptive for what he referred to as the “masses”: “The reason the restraint of population growth in these areas is moving so slowly is the fact that the methods we offer are Western methods, methods poorly suited to [non-Western] culture[s] and to the control of mass population growth. Our methods are largely birth control for the individual, not for a nation.”1 Guttmacher, who was the chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and would soon become the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and a leader in the International Planned Parenthood Federation, implied that the available nonsurgical birth control methods at the time, such as barrier methods and the newly developed oral contraceptives, were suitable only for Westerners, who were presumed to be educated and motivated enough to use them correctly and consistently. By implicitly distinguishing Western individuals from nonWestern users, he suggested that women in developing countries could not be trusted to use existing contraceptives. Simultaneously, he positioned the IUD as “birth control for a nation” and characterized its intended users as a disindividualized “mass” equated to a national “population.”2 Guttmacher later described with fascination in his 1969 book Birth Control and Love how devices were inserted like machine parts into submissive women on an IUD installment assembly line in Hong Kong: The best IUD manipulator I have observed was in Hong Kong. . . . Her record was seventy-five insertions in three hours[,] . . . that is one every two minutes and twenty-four seconds. Dr. Wong kept three nurses busy helping her. One was supervising the removal of panties of the next patient, the second nurse soothed the brow 34 Chapter 2 of the patient on the table and the third passed instruments to Dr. Wong. I have never seen such graceful hands, such exquisite economy of finger movement; there wasn’t a false motion.3 Rather than considering fertility control as a complex social practice involving individuals, families, communities, and the state, his technocentric vision for reducing population size privileged the consecutive insertions of a device in machine-like bodies. Feminist scholars have criticized his remarks , aptly calling it “gynecological Taylorism.”4 Here I draw attention to the particular kind of power over the body that Guttmacher and his fellow IUD developers found desirable: a technoscientific biopower that is wielded using scientific knowledge making and technological solution.5 IUD enthusiasts during the 1960s shared the vision that population management was a matter of figuring out how best to manipulate the biological function of reproduction. It fell on some initial researchers to build what amounted to a machine part that efficiently controls the uterus. They used their skills and positions as scientists and physicians to test various devices to find out which one worked best in women. They also systematically measured how different models performed and produced authoritative studies about this contraceptive method. This chapter charts how women in the IUD discourse were stripped of agency as they were represented as “the population,” reduced to the anatomy of their uteruses in scientific studies of the device, and converted into statistical data in clinical trials. The scientific discourse and activities analyzed in this chapter took place during the 1960s and early 1970s. I start, however, by outlining the historical relationships among contraceptive development, population science, and Western imperialism. Drawing this connection enables us to see modern contraceptive research as an extension of colonial relationships and as a biopolitical endeavor enmeshed with the neo-Malthusian movement and the cold war. The main sections analyze the scientific activities aimed at perfecting and validating the modern IUD as a biopolitical tool. Researchers ’ focus on uterine physiology removed agency from users and relocated it to biology, making it more palatable for technological intervention without consideration of individual women’s desires and conditions. Quantification of contraceptive performances had a similar effect of collapsing social differences into biological sameness. Altogether the analyses in this chapter illustrate how technoscientific biopower, or the will to intervene in “Birth Control for a Nation” 35 life collectively using technological and scientific apparatuses, became the dominant framework for IUD development. Finally, I discuss how the technocratic...