Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning

The Medium Shapes the Message

45 At the end of World War II, Planned Parenthood had to redefine its role. Communications experts, who had benefited from the wartime need for propaganda, required a new focus in the postwar period. Experts on public opinion who had specialized in promoting the image of American activities now hoped to find a purpose for mass persuasion in peacetime. In a return to the concerns of an earlier era, demographers, economists, and politicians began to express anxiety about the rate of reproduction among the poor, this time not just at home but around the world. Overpopulation threatened to spark new wars just as peace had been secured. For a field in search of a focus, the issue was ideal. It resurrected the specter of unchecked population growth that had dominated the birth control debate in the early twentieth century and elevated it to a matter of global importance. As one prominent communications expert suggested to a colleague in 1945, “Our big task now is to communicate to large masses some of the ideas that may save us from race suicide.”1 Family planning advocates were able to capitalize on the growing interest in the overpopulation issue to expand their media activities. As specialists who were looking for postwar applications of their research devised new strategies of persuasion, they developed the first theories of mass communication specific to family planning. Planned Parenthood applied these ideas in various projects , eventually founding a specialized department of Information and Education to shape the organization’s media efforts. The partnership between family planning advocates and the burgeoning academic discipline of communication proved mutually beneficial as messaging strategies were theorized and tested in the service of the population crisis. Planned Parenthood gained new expertise The Medium Shapes the Message Chapter 3 46 Broadcasting Birth Control while communications researchers found renewed purpose (and funding) for their work. Politicians and the press took up the issue of fertility control as part of an intensive focus on overpopulation at the same time that other sexually related topics were beginning to appear more regularly in public discourse. Indeed, the representation of sex in U.S. culture expanded exponentially in this period as commercial media diversified and attitudes toward sexuality became more liberal . The new attitudes were apparent in the introduction of Playboy magazine in 1953, and accelerated by the Kinsey reports on sexuality of 1948 and 1953, and the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the contraceptive pill in 1960. In the mid-1960s, polls revealed broad public support for family planning for population control.2 As a result, family planning promoters found new opportunities to broadcast their message. Planned Parenthood began to target television , the most popular medium of the era. Although at first they encountered the same kinds of barriers as they had in film and radio, they eventually found TV more accommodating. The industry was struggling to assert its relevance in the face of criticisms over programming that was bland and of poor quality. Following the lead of the women’s movement and other supporters of abortion reform, Planned Parenthood began to broaden its purview to include campaigning for legal abortion for the first time. As the sexual revolution unfolded in the 1960s, family planning advocates expected increasing tolerance for the topic among broadcasters and audiences. However, the growing public discourse on sexuality gradually began to impede family planning advocacy because it also galvanized groups opposed to sex education, women’s liberation , public funding for family planning, the sexual revolution, and abortion. Both supporters and opponents used media to win over public opinion on the abortion issue. This battle increased in intensity after the procedure was legalized nationwide by Roe v. Wade in 1973. As the backlash grew, family planning promoters frequently found themselves on the losing end of aggressive publicity stunts. Patients and clinic staff also suffered threats and harassment . These events and growing conservatism about the treatment of sexuality in educational media convinced Planned Parenthood to tone down its rhetoric and deemphasize sex. The organization thus completed the process initiated when the movement began to align with the medical profession earlier in the century and parted ways with feminism. This capitulation had enormous consequences for the promotion of family planning and access to contraception and abortion services in ensuing years. The shift also prompted some family planning promoters to strike out on their own, either to pursue less conservative media projects or to advance an explicitly feminist agenda.3 [18.188.61.223] Project...