In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion Birth Control and Feminism Trying to control reproduction has been a human activity from as far back as historians can trace it. Reproduction control efforts constitute part of the evidence that biology has never been destiny, that even those functions most often described as “natural,” such as reproduction, have always been formed by cultural and social organizations. In the twentieth century there was rapid , if intermittent, progress in birth control but also some disappointment. Methods became safer and more efficient, and their use became more widespread . But many people have been excluded from this progress. Women continue to suffer, even die, from birth control efforts, especially abortion— casualties that are due more to prohibitions and criminalization than to necessary risks. Birth control is an area of very uneven development. For example, a majority of births throughout the world remain unplanned and perhaps unintended . But these children are by no means necessarily unwanted; indeed, the equation of desire with planning, the assumption that unplanned means unwanted , is an ahistorical, ideological view of self-determination. The notion of “planned parenthood” is, from a historical perspective, relatively recent, a unique product of twentieth-century industrial civilization, small-family preference , individualism, women’s employment, and the high cost of rearing children. The limitation of the population control vision was its failure to understand that birth control motivation is historically constructed. Similar misunderstandings support the continuing perception of the teenage pregnancy problem in the United States as an effect of immorality, pathology, or ignorance , when in fact it too is more deeply a matter of motivation. Yet unplanned pregnancies in the United States, as in India and elsewhere, are often misfortunes that signal resignation to limited futures. The defects of contraception in advanced countries represent another kind 15.CONC.357-364/Gord 9/25/02, 10:46 AM 357 358 / Conclusion of underdevelopment. This inadequacy is not only a matter of dangerous and uncomfortable methods and of serviceable methods made obsolete but also a lack of access to contraception resulting from poverty, despair, deprivation of opportunity, sexual prudery, and sexual coercion. Moreover, another feature of this uneven development is the expectation that a “magic bullet” is possible —a contraceptive medicine that will have no side effects, require no sexual responsibility, and produce 100 percent protection. The birth control problem does not stem from an inevitable, tragic march toward an overly high-tech civilization. Rather, the problems are primarily political—which has been the major argument of this book. Access, motivation , and technological development are all shaped by political conflicts and negotiations, sometimes personal, sometimes so far out of individual control that most people are unaware that decisions are being made. In the first chapters of this book I discussed how ancient societies used birth control and how this practice was then constrained or even stopped by religious and other cultural prohibitions. Interconnecting forms of class and male domination privileged large families and women’s subordination. Industrialization (and to some extent commercial capitalism before that) subverted many of those traditional agrarian patterns, making large families less advantageous for some, creating an individual wage-labor economy in place of a family economy, and sparking a decline in birth and death rates. From industrialization arose a new kind of mass politics in which birth control was involved from very early on. In the early nineteenth-century British socialist and trade union movements, birth control was a topic of serious discussion . The reception of birth control as anti–working class by some labor radicals helped stimulate a women’s critique of the male socialist vision.1 In the United States in this period a variety of reform perspectives, many of them quite feminist, spoke positively about the use of birth control. These streams coalesced in the 1870s into the first major political defense of birth control in the United States, voluntary motherhood, which emphasized the dignity of motherhood and women’s right to refuse sexual activity. In line with the dominant tendencies in women’s rights movements at that time, voluntary motherhood thinking resisted the separation of heterosexual intercourse from reproduction . This position was conditioned in part by feminists’ understanding of women’s sexual subordination and their sources of social power and in part by the strong conservative opposition to birth control that had succeeded in criminalizing abortion in most states and in categorizing birth control information as obscene. At the end of the nineteenth century the anti–birth control forces in the United States were ascendant, having...

Share