Immaculate Contraception: 50 Years of the Pill May 9, 2010
Posted by guestposter in Feminism.trackback
Here at CLR, we’re nothing if not true feminists, and so we couldn’t let this anniversary go unnoticed. Thanks to GoodHardRant for the following
May 9th this year marks the fiftieth non-birthday of the contraceptive pill. Licensed rather more swiftly than the unpleasant, sometimes dangerous side-effects of its high dose hormones would warrant, the Pill’s ability to prevent pregnancy seemed like a miracle for women and society. Introduced on the cusp of the sixties, oral contraceptives have been credited with not only the liberalization of sexual attitudes, but also accelerating women’s liberation. Time magazine has run a substantial piece by author Nancy Gibbs that gives a good analysis of the changes made by the legalization of the oral contraceptive. Gibbs is clear that the Pill was not the key to a new feminist consciousness, but was instrumental in altering women’s lives at a practical level that catalyzed pre-existent feminist movements. As historian Elaine Tyler May claims, “the revolutionary potential of the Pill could never have been achieved without the opportunities that came about because of women’s activism.” So the synthetic hormones helped, but the change in social attitudes, economic activity, reproduction and education had all begun long before Enovaid. Market forces also contributed to its creation, given the huge profit offered to pharmaceutical companies. But the Pill’s female supporters – Katherine McCormack and Margaret Sanger – recognized that “birth control is the first important step [a woman] must take towards the goal of … [becoming] a man’s equal”. These were not utopian leftists: Sanger’s proposed eugenic uses for it show the political, as well as the economic, stakes of contraception. From its inception the Pill was about power, control, and access – contraceptive freedom and coercion.
In practice, the Pill did not become the dominant means of contraception for at least a decade, but its convenience and effectiveness altered women’s experience of both sexuality and reproduction. It allowed a degree of autonomy previously unobtainable without significant sacrifice. The capacity to delay or avoid pregnancy all together allowed women to take advantage of work and education more freely than at any time previously, as well as enjoying heterosexual sex without the crippling anxiety associated with unwanted childbirth. Economically it gave the individual and the family increased mobility and flexibility to work in the public sphere. Again the rise of women in the workplace was a post-war phenomenon, but one which was confirmed by the Pill’s innovation. Research suggests that contraceptive rights, neatly symbolized by the Pill, have been the most important innovation for women’s economic and social status, linked to increased investment in education, perceived well being and participation in civil society. What could be more empowering than assuming economic responsibility and equality (in theory at least) with men?
In the Republic, where access to the Pill is a relatively recent and hard-won right, its anniversary seems even more relevant. A recent article in the Irish Times generally celebrates the Pill’s effects on society, whilst introducing a note of caution over long-term use. Praising the Pill’s ability to give women a liberating responsibility over reproductive choices, the article notes the disparity between the Republic, where doctors prescribe it, and countries like France, where nurses and pharmacists can provide it. The double standard applied to women’s reproductive rights lingers on; as seen in the USA, where you are more likely to get Health Cover for Viagra than for the Pill. Despite the fact that in the south, and to a lesser extent in Northern Ireland, bureaucracy and medical constraints still apply, what the Pill represents has changed society irrevocably.
Of course the Pill is not instant feminist liberation: its commercial availability in countries such as Saudi Arabia coexists with profound gender inequality and oppression. Feminism too is increasingly suspicious of the Pill, with mistrust of its hormonal intervention in women’s bodies going as far back as The Female Eunuch. The success of oral contraception has not translated to an equivalent for men (May quotes one scientist explaining that “the psychological trauma of shrinking testes just cannot be overcome”; well indeed). Recent bourgeois feminism has been much given to lamenting the horrors of choice created by the Pill: the paralysis of when or whether to procreate, with whom, how many times, the internecine bitchery of working versus stay-at-home motherhood and sitting in judgment on the choices of working class women. It’s ironic that glib lifestyle politics threaten to overshadow an innovation capable of liberating working class women from economic and social marginalisation. Issues of contraceptive coercion often masquerade as moral responsibility, and attitudes toward the Pill crystallize many class conflicts as well as more obvious gender conflicts. In marking its 50th anniversary it would be salutary to reclaim the Pill not as part of a bourgeois “moral property” (as a former French Minister for Health described RU486) but as a means of empowering mass solidarity, economic freedom and equality.
That’s very interesting GHR. It’s sort of the unwritten story of social change, isn’t it? Technological progress. Or rather that such developments can trigger huge effects. I think that’s a very important point that in specific instances it doesn’t have to usher in progressive outcomes, albeit more broadly it has been generally so. When I was in school in Kilbarrack in the 1970s and 1980s the number of families with 11 or more kids was huge. The cargo of misery that sometimes – not always I hasten to add – could engender was significant. The point was to offer the choice.
Were those families of 11 children miserable? I only ask because I never knew any families that large (6 kids was the biggest family I knew of). If you’d surveyed the kids where I grew up – suburban American town – you’d almost certainly have heard that divorced parents and not family size was the key to misery.
My mum once had to deal with the case of a woman who had 12 children, only to find that her uterus failed after child no. 12.
My mum and the nurses pulled back the bedclothes to find her entire hospital bed sodden with blood from the ensuing haemorrhage.
Perhaps a certain type of person would regard that sort of thing as a mere bagatelle, to be taken in one’s stride. Or perhaps not.
Yeah it’s important to remember that increased personal liberty is not a replacement for an emphasis on social equality. The emancipation of sexuality – whether by science, legalisation of homosexuality, or changed cultural attitudes – has been a profoundly transformative experience for the better for people in the countries where it has taken place. But those benefits have resulted in the downgrading of economics. Once again, it’s all the fault of identity politics, which can never replace class politics.
I found GHR’s point about Saudi Arabia particularly interesting. Like GHR says, and like you say, technological change is progressive only within the right set of broader circumstances. One of the problems with the last century was an automatic assumption that technology = progress. A similar way of thinking can be discerned about green issues sometimes. Improved green policies need not be progressive. As we can see with water charges, or proposals to limit flights to those who can afford to pay massively increased prices.
Actually that ties in with the Fred Hoyle book as well. Hoyle had a remarkably optimistic view of science in and of itself.
Funny how the science as utopia versus dystopia thing is still going after all this time. Fiction writers can’t get enough of it.
Just going back to what you were saying about family size. Funny to see the discourse that used to be used about Irish Catholics transferred so easily to Muslims, and their family size. The fall in family size is in and of itself a major social change facilitated by the pill, though whether it was wrought by it I guess is a different issue. If it wasn’t the pill, it would have been something else.
That’s absolutely true re the transfer to Muslims. Interesting thing is that Scientific American had a piece recently on how all family sizes are falling now. Not – clearly – simply through the pill. But that being an element.
I wonder if the availability of the Pill hasn’t actually been an important factor in the decline of socialist politics? My train of thinking is that people who wouldpreviously have been having families very early in adult life are not able to enjoy a greater income, a lot more employment mobility, generally consider themselves consumers and people with ambition.
(This isn’t intended as a provocation and nor should it be thought that it means I’m in any way against the widest possible availability of the Pill. It’s just something that’s gone through my mind recently when considering certain very widespread changes in political thinking over the period of my life, and pondering the possible roots of these.)
Interesting point EJH. Bit of a chicken and egg thing regarding changes in the economy and consumer culture and the pill. Certainly I would think they are all tied up. I guess it partly depends on when we want to date the decline of the socialist politics from. Because you can make the argument that it was available and the left was growing in the 1960 and 70s to some extent.
Funny to see the discourse that used to be used about Irish Catholics transferred so easily to Muslims, and their family size.
Fits nicely along with being ‘controlled by their religion’,’ subjugating women’, and being sympathetic to ‘terrorists’.
Thanks, both.
Garibaldy, I think you’re right about the risk of confusing personal liberty with social equality. It’s remarkable how personal choice has become an excuse for intervention and control. Contraceptive choices are used by the media as a prime index of class, often in order to encourage moral condemnation of particular class groups and justify state legislation. This goes along with the valorization of certain contraceptive choices (though it’s a risky tightrope for women in Daily Mail-land). The Pill _was_ a breakthrough in terms of autonomy for women, but the framework for that autonomy is still unequal and class-based. What the pill did was given individual freedom, but freedom within society, which remains overwhelmingly class-bound. There is some really interesting recent research done in the States by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone which has looked at the way in which class (and race) affects US families. What they have found is that conservative policy in the US makes contraception almost solely a moral issue. In attempting to push back the tide of permissiveness the government cannot ban the pill, but they _can_ cut federal support for contraceptive provision to the poorest in society. This is partly, I think, an attempt to police working class sexuality and punish _economically_ the working classes. Limited access to contraception has the knock-on effect that sex becomes more risky: the situation with Medicaid only exacerbates this.
Hopefully this anniversary will see more people think about how much more is needed for real choice.
I remember the first time an American girl told me she had to pay for the pill. I was amazed. So at the same time, they are looking to cut teenage pregnancy and abortion while putting contraception out of people’s reach. As per your point about insurance and viagra and the pill.
Choice and economics is a link that the various Labour Parties on these islands would do well to rediscover.
I remember the first time an American girl told me she had to pay for the pill. I was amazed.
Not that amazing. You pay for the pill here (the RoI) too – and it costs in the same range as the US (not huge money tbh – the price of a pint a week).
This was a teenager who’d just told me about how much sex education they got, stuff about pregnancy prevention etc. And yet they weren’t making it available to teenagers for free. So I was surprised, especially as she had described where she got it as like the Brooke Centre.
This is partly, I think, an attempt to police working class sexuality and punish _economically_ the working classes.
With, of course, the entirely accidental by-product of a constant supply of teenage working class mothers dropping out of school and into minimum wage jobs.
Exactly. Convenient, that.
As someone who is definitely in favor of the the pill, happy birthday! As someone who has seen the side effects of taking the pill and has been frustrated by the inability for a male counter part I’ve got a few things to say. The point about male birth control shrinking the testes was something I heard in Catholic marriage classes and the point that once that happened research stopped was about as far as they went. When I dug deeper myself I discovered that no male birth control pill existed due to the fact that it was much easier to stop one egg a month than millions of sperm a day. Simple, but true and much to my chagrin. Obviously the long term effects of taking the pill for women can be serious it should be noted that technology cannot absolve us of personal responsibility. Since when does being working class allow one to neglect that fact?
yourcousin, apparently there have been advances in the male Pill, and the shrinkage is no longer an issue, but the millions of swimmers makes it a much more complex prevention. I suspect pharmaceutical companies are much less interested given the way the market for contraceptives is mapped out. The Pill can be utterly nasty, and often women have to resort to a trial and error approach with multiple variations. I don’t think being working class absolves anyone of responsibility, but it does involve a differing set of circumstances and issues of access. The Pill on its own doesn’t create a level playing field for contraceptive choices. BTW, those marriage classes sound pretty enlightening.
As a feminist myself, and as a 40 something who wouldn’t have the energy for any more babies, I recommend the snip. Beats the pill as a long-term solution. It sort of assumes monogamy of course.
Meant to put a
on that. I’m not sure if males can seriously consider themselves feminists, it’s a tricky one.
I thought, and this is my own limited experience, that after HIV and the problems for women associated with long (and for some short) term use of the Pill, condoms had become the norm, even among committed couples.
As per usual, I don’t have any kind of statistical evidence for this.
Wow – if you look at the stats, even in Europe it varies widely, the Danes and Spaniards like condoms where as they are comparatively little in Germany.
The use I mean, not the size.
Anyone have stats for NI and RoI?
[...] to Cedar Lounge Revolution for putting this [...]
FPA says that the 2003-4 Continuous Household Survey in NI reported 40% of women from 19-49 used the Pill, 26% condoms, 6% IUD, 6% injectables, 5% natural FP and 2 % diaphragms. Don’t know about anything since then, but there might have been.
Anyone else remember when doctors weren’t allowed to prescribe the pill here in the republic for contraceptive purposes, but could for ‘irregular menstrual cycles’? And thus there were something like 120, 000 women in Ireland with irregular cycles – a statistical wonder!
This was at a time when the only sources of condoms in Dublin were the two family planning clinics and the machine in Trinity SU that was usually broken. A friend of mine used to do security at the FPC in Cathal Brugha St. in the evenings to protect the staff from occasional incursions by catholic vigilantes – and shop lifting (usually by guys too shy to ask…).
It’s an effort to reconstruct the moral atmosphere then – it was wise, if looking for a flat with partner to borrow a wedding ring, and it wasn’t unusual to be turned away from a B&B in the country if a couple signed in with different surnames.
I believe that was what is known as ‘the good old days’.
Yep I recall being told by a woman that she had been on the pill ‘for medical reasons’. The ‘Medical Reasons’ being emphasised.
Many moons ago I was at my then girlfriends house. On the News there was one of these regular medical scares about the Pill. Whereupon her concerned father wandered in and asked…
“You’re not on that tablet are you?”
Colm Tóibín has an essay in The Trial of the Generals about his traipse around Dublin GPs getting (or not, in one case, if I remember correctly) a prescription for condoms during the period of Haughey’s ‘Irish solution to an Irish problem’.
Has a woman actually posted on this issue here yet?! The story of the pill in the rep of ireland since the 60s had an amazing impact on women’s lives, in my view.
I believe GHR would qualify there…http://goodhardrant.wordpress.com/about/
Er. I’m female, last time I checked.
I’m from Northern Ireland, so my experience is somewhat different from women in the Republic. I may be too young to remember the seismic impact on women’s lives, but I certainly know that my Mother’s generation had a hugely better time of it than their own mothers – and were grateful and conscious of this. I think in my own generation there was/is a general acceptance of the Pill, but also a certain reticence about using it for contraception till maybe the twenties and a rather weird early reliance on emergency contraception. I’m really very wary of generalising though. I think, and again tentatively, that in those younger than me there has been another shift again in ideas of contraception. And not necessarily a more progressive one either.
Is it true that the church was a major shareholder in the company that first developed the pill?
One of the central campaigns of the Revolutionary Marxist group was the “Contraceptive Action programme” for the legalisation of the pill. I remember distributing leaflets in a Limerick election campaign. We take for granted the social gains of the last 40 years. My mother on having a still birth asked about contraception at the Coombe and got a lecture on Humanae Vitae for her pains.
The reactionaries in Holles street even opposed lectures on the Safe period. They were even worse than the Pope.Practices like symphiosiotomy were trailled on the poor. Look at the Drogheda scandal (forced hysterectomes) which is not that long ago
“The emancipation of sexuality – whether by science, legalisation of homosexuality, or changed cultural attitudes – has been a profoundly transformative experience for the better for people in the countries where it has taken place. But those benefits have resulted in the downgrading of economics. Once again, it’s all the fault of identity politics, which can never replace class politics.”
I have to disagree. This is a false opposition. Socialist fighting against oppression cannot insist that it bend to so-called class politics. By leading the fight against oppression they can help win over people to a broader class position by convincing people that full freedom from all kinds of oppression can only be secured by socialism.
On the downgrading of class politics. I would consider access to contraception and abortion as class politics. The rich can get it easily not the poor.I think the relationship between structure( in the last analysis it is class struggle that counts) and superstructure( the whole array of religion, bourgeois demcracy etc. which obscures the realities of oppression) is a little more complex.
I am sure that you don’t have such a crude approach. I am reminded of old fashioned leftists who did not consider the banning of “Spare Rib” a class issue.
Even though the church is on its last legs it still controlls hospitals and schools. With ethics committees it still has the say on what is allowed in state funded hospitals.We still have 1000s deprived of safe abortion facilities and forced to travel. The struggle for a secular state, an uncompleted part of the bourgeois democrat revolution ( I can still do marxist script) has not concluded.We need to drive the church (sorry all of them) out of the schools and the hospitals.
“Even though the church is on its last legs”
Well I’d like to believe that for sure. However I had a shock at the weekend at a family event, a catholic church confirmation in co. Galway, church was packed to the gills and the bishop presiding received a large round of applause and support for the tough time he’s had recently arising from the Murphy report. Shocking I tell you, that the tradition and the institution and this particular individual continue to receive such popular support. Contrast with the handful of people who showed up last Saturday in Dublin for the May Day march.
So perhaps those “last legs” have more life in them than we might wish to believe.
My grandmother (her youngest was born in 1942) was warned by her doctor in the late 1930s that she could not medically afford to have another child, and was advised to adopt the rhythm “method”. She asked the PP if he would speak to my grandfather about the timing of intercourse, explaining that her doctor said she was at risk of death if she had another child. The PP told her that if she died in childbirth, then it was God’s will.
Poorly worded on my part Jim. I mean an over-concentration on those benefits has led to the downgrading on economics among many sections of the left. Clearly though the demands for democratic rights and secularism are an integral part of the socialist struggle, and are of the utmost importance to the working class.
Fair enough Garibaldi, we are in agreement.On poor wording I am no angel myself. On a general point I suppose we should all avoid the false necessity of giving a total program in a contribution. We can leave that sort of discussion to the Sparts and the Irish Woirkers Group/Workers Power.
The womens movement as well as the direct socialist movement has had a fair range of opinion. It is a pity a history of Irish Women United has not yet been written. It included a broad range of opinion and paralleled the Socialist movement with its discussions. A challenge for any Socialist movement or party is to genuinely integrate the parallel struggles and women, anti-racism, solidarity struggles in a meaningful way and to recognise and accept the different dynamics which can exist..It is a tribute to Connolly that he was respected by the feminists of his day because of the genuineness and effectiveness of his committment.
I to a degree envied the women in the RMG/PD during a certain period when the struggle on other fronts was fairly weak, because of the scale and vibrancy of the womens movement at that stage.
I would agree the church still packs a kick and I would not underestimate the appeal of other brands of obscuratism which are around. I have even heard justifications and defence of female circumcision.To me all brands of religion are dead ends (theology being a subject without an object) but some are more virulant than others.Some like mainstream anglicanism across the water appear to have compromised with progress to a degree. Some even accept some of Darwin.But I have to say I am with Dawkins on religion.
But on a cadre basis the church is fairly moribund. If I saw 2 priests under 60 it would be a topic of conversation.
Given the comradely willingness of this forum to consider male contraception, I thought this might be of interest:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8674380.stm
Non-hormonal temporary infertility for those who don’t want the snip.
“Once the testis has stopped producing sperm and all “sperm reserves” have been depleted, explain the researchers, the man will be temporarily infertile”
I seem to recall that post-snip it can take 3 months or so for those “reserves” to deplete fully, or so I was advised anyhow. Which sort of reduces the effective window resulting from the ultrasound method described in that piece.
Indeed. Incredible stuff altogether, and I wonder how many men would be interested in it, but good to see companion research being undertaken.
While that may well be good news, much like every other male treatment it is “still in development”.