Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning

Introduction

1 In 1967, Walt Disney Studios, in collaboration with the Population Council, released an animated movie called Family Planning. This extraordinary film, which was translated into twenty-three languages and was distributed widely in Asia and Latin America, features Donald Duck at an artist’s easel illustrating the burdens of unlimited reproduction and the technologies of birth control while a narrator describes the benefits of limiting family size. America’s beloved cartoon duck was put to work to promote the use of contraception as part of an international movement against overpopulation that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, but the film is part of a much longer history of the birth control movement’s use of mass media. In fact, media has played a key role in the birth control movement since the very beginning of its twentieth-century campaign. The history of the birth control movement is traditionally told through accounts of the leaders and organizations that fought for legal access to contraception . The extensive use of mass media to build support for legalization and then publicize the idea of fertility control and the availability of contraceptive services has been largely overlooked. Scholars have only recently begun to examine the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and even novels, in advancing the cause.1 This book builds on this scholarship, moving beyond the printed page to examine the films and radio and television broadcasts birth control advocates developed and the communications experts they increasingly turned to for guidance over the course of the twentieth century . Taking advantage of a rich and relatively unexplored archive of media materials and archival documents describing their production and use, this Introduction Chapter 1 2 Broadcasting Birth Control research reveals the critical role of media in the campaign to transform the private subject of birth control into one fit for public discussion. Of course, other factors contributed to the gradual shift in its favor. I do not focus on measuring the impact of specific media on laws and social prohibitions. Instead, I explore the expectations birth control advocates held for film, radio, and television and how these expectations, and the media themselves, helped shape the messages they disseminated. The story is not one of uninterrupted progress from repression to openness. In fact, information about ways to prevent or end pregnancy circulated freely in the early nineteenth century in family conversations and in consultations with midwives and healers and began to appear in print in the 1830s. By the 1850s, magazines, newspapers, and popular health manuals featured numerous advertisements for drugs and home treatments. This increasing visibility brought the topic of reproductive control under the scrutiny of purity crusaders and members of the medical profession, who sought to stamp out the proliferation of advertising and the activities of nonphysicians. The distribution of material about contraception and abortion was eventually restricted thanks to their efforts. In 1873, Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, successfully petitioned Congress to limit the delivery by post of “obscene materials,” including descriptions of contraceptive devices and abortifacients and information on how to obtain them. The ruling was followed by similar state laws, the last of which was not overturned until 1965.2 In the decades following the Comstock Act, advocates for “voluntary motherhood” launched a campaign to legalize contraception, but the movement made few gains against the powerful anti-obscenity lobby. In the early twentieth century, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and Mary Ware Dennett spearheaded various efforts, and Sanger quickly became the movement’s leading figure. From the very beginning of their activities, campaigners used the mass media as a way around the Comstock law.3 Historians characterize the period from 1914 to 1936 as one of declining radicalism as Sanger established her leadership. The movement shifted away from the rhetoric of female sexual liberation that had first informed its efforts in an attempt to make “birth control” respectable, replacing the term and narrowing the agenda to “family planning.” This is often described as the end of the agitation phase, when birth control advocates gave up their most controversial activities in an effort to build alliances with powerful elite groups, especially the medical profession.4 Incorporating media history into the history of the birth control movement demonstrates, however, that rather than retreating into dignified discussion with only medical experts, birth control advocates Introduction 3 continued to use mass culture to...