Bodies of Evidence: Activists, Patients, and the FDA Regulation of Depo-Provera

In January 1983, the FDA held one of only two scientific “Public Boards of Inquiry” in the history of the administration to determine whether to approve Depo-Provera for use as a contraceptive in the United States. At the hearing, ideas about gender and power played a central role in negotiations between scientists, doctors, patients, and women’s health activists. The nature of the Depo-Provera Public Board of Inquiry lends itself to analysis of the interaction between and among these groups, each of which had a vested interest in the outcome of the FDA decision. The stories and strategies emerging from the actors involved in the Public Board of Inquiry reveal the enormous complexity of regulating reproduction in the late twentieth century.