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159 In 1962, steroidal oral contraceptives—the various versions of the Pill—were at the center of a major controversy, one that was to have far-reaching effects. A growing number of reports cited bloodclot problems among women taking the Pill, including a number of fatalities. Some were calling for the Pill to be taken off the market. The pharmaceutical companies, with the support of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), were hesitating and arguing that the evidence linking the Pill with thromboembolism was merely circumstantial. They undoubtedly had a strong financial incentive to wait for more evidence; in 1962 Searle pharmaceutical alone had sales of $56.6 million (Reed, 1983, p. 364). Physicians were split, with a minority suggesting that the well-known carcinogenic risks of estrogen alongside the emergent problems of an apparent correlation with thromboembolism argued at least for extreme conservatism in prescribing the Pill. This state of uncertainty persisted until 1975, when researchers agreed that a by then considerably modified pill was safe for healthy, nonsmoking women younger than age 35. This was a foundational moment for the women’s health movement in the United States. The controversy over the Pill proved in retrospect to be the beginning of the end of the unchallenged authority of physicians , researchers, and the FDA to pronounce about women’s health. Journalists, physicians, and patients wrote a series of books about the unrecognized and unacknowledged dangers of the Pill, with titles such as The Bitter Pill (Grant, 1985), Pregnancy as a Disease (Merkin, 1976), and First, Do No Harm: A Dying Woman’s Battle Against the Physicians and Drug Companies Who Misled Her About the Hazards of the Pill (Greenfield, 1976). Perhaps the best-known of these books was Barbara Seaman’s 7 The Pill in Puerto Rico and Mainland United States Negotiating Discourses of Risk and Decolonization L AUR A BR IG GS University of Arizona laura briggs 160 (1969) The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill. Out of this controversy activists founded the National Women’s Health Network, which was and remains an important source of unofficial information and an organizing center for lobbying and activism around women’s health issues (McLaughlin, 1982). This controversy was joined to others: the thalidomide tragedy of 1962, in which a tranquilizer given to pregnant women caused severe limb deformities in their offspring, and a subsequent disaster with another hormonal drug, DES, which was administered to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage and later discovered to cause significant reproductive health problems for girls born of those pregnancies. These events together marked the beginning of a kind of women’s health activism that is still visible, for example in the legal and medical battle over silicone breast implants (and, as Samantha King argues in this volume, that has been co-opted in the philanthropists’ campaign for funding for breast cancer research). Ironically, as Paula Treichler (1992) has noted, it was in and through these battles over women’s health that the FDA established regulations that AIDS activists would work hard to undo). I want to revisit this foundational moment and the events that led up to it because our essential paradigms for understanding what was at stake then are in important ways misleading. Where we have basically suggested that it was something to do with the dispensability of “women” as such—a lack of concern about (all) women’s bodies—that allowed researchers and physicians to encourage healthy women to use an untried and potentially dangerous medication, this was only part of the story. It was a struggle constructed also by the belief that many risks could be taken with contraceptives for working-class and Third World women, a trajectory in which First World women were in some sense bystanders. The research on the Pill belonged to a particular cold war moment, in which technological and scientific interventions were quite explicitly meant to solve economic and political problems, in this case, Third World poverty and Communism. At a time when the health risks of estrogenic contraceptives were unknown and the argument for giving healthy women a potent steroidal medication was quite controversial, researchers and funders grounded the rationale for the development of the Pill in overpopulation, the belief that Third World poverty was caused by excessive childbearing, and that this poverty, in turn, caused nations to “go over” to Communism. Within a few years, U.S. forces would be distributing birth control pills in South Vietnam, even as they dropped napalm on civilian...

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