Feminist Indebtedness

Both the historical ties between development aid and population control technologies and the material ties between feminist political health claims and expert-controlled and capitalist-distributed reproductive technologies reveal the centrality of debt to the formation of particular responsibilities and potential freedoms. How does such indebtedness inform feminist pursuits of freedom when the practical terrain is the body? We take on debt acknowledging our responsibility to adhere to the terms of the debt, while seeking new freedoms through the material advantages indebtedness confers. How can a feminist technoscience contend with these paradoxical formations of control and liberation?

The four books under review trace the historical, geopolitical, and economic aspects of reproductive technology and highlight where feminist agendas fit within these complex formations. To varying degrees of success, each grapples with how the shifting ideologies of women as a population to control, as a population to exercise control, and as a population of citizen-consumers has tied the experience of reproduction to technoscience in both productive and dangerous ways. It is undoubtedly the case that feminist reproductive health politics is indebted to profoundly antifeminist technological developments. Margaret Sanger, the early and influential advocate of birth control, shifted her focus from the diaphragm, which she thought would fail to limit the fertility of the poor in the United States and in the global South, to a hormonal contraceptive pill (Takeshita, Global Biopolitics, 38–39; Prescott, The Morning After,11). Eugenic and neo-Malthusian, the global development agenda was crucial for the initial funding and development of reproductive technologies that were also key components of the political demands for women’s reproductive freedom. Today, as analyzed in various essays in Browner and Sargent’s Reproduction, Globalization, and the State, the debt-creating development aid radically influences the provision of reproductive health care in family planning programs, AIDS clinics, and refugee camps across the globe, often in contradictory and nonfeminist ways (Gutmann 2011; Richey 2011; Whiteford and Eden 2011).

Chikako Takeshita’s The Global Politics of the IUD provides a fascinating look into the development of IUDs, a technology that “embodies the paradox of the simultaneous possibility of giving women control over their bodies and taking it away from them” (5). The belief of development experts that women in the global South constituted a population in need of scientific control allowed for the development of IUDs in ways that glossed over dangerous and painful side effects. These ignored side effects ironically undermined the widespread adoption of IUDs that international aid agencies desired. Takeshita demonstrates that the IUD as a method of coercive reproductive control relied on the need to justify the IUD as a technology suitable for the global North as well. After the removal from the U.S. market of the Dalkon shield after it resulted in over ninety thousand injured women in the United States, “IUD advocates were concerned that Western donors and the U.S. government might be accused of wrongdoing if they continued to distribute a contraceptive method that was no longer being sold to American women” (101). Thus, the search for the correct U.S. consumer for IUDs and marketing of IUDs such that women in the United States would use them was part and parcel of the justification of fertility control abroad. Takeshita’s careful tracing of the shifts in how the subjects appropriate for IUD use were understood provides illuminating insight into the contradictory life of the IUD as a simultaneously feminist, neo-Malthusian, and neoliberalist instrument of reproductive choice and control. The complex stance toward the IUD slightly fades in the later chapters of the book, as Takeshita sees...