Technology and Culture

Intrauterine devices made from fishing wire at “contraceptive parties” in 1970s Cuba. Robot-only brothels in twenty-first-century metropolises of Canada and Germany. Herbal teas prepared with pennyroyal in the slavery-era Caribbean to bring on menstruation. These are some of the technologies [End Page 949] Donna Drucker describes in Contraception: A Concise History—a book that asks what the history of technology might look like from the vantage point of reproductive justice.

The result is a dynamic, often imaginative synthesis that places power relationships at the center of the development, use, and non-use of contraceptive technologies. That is because for Drucker, employing a reproductive justice framework meant attending to the role contraception has played in allowing individuals capable of pregnancy “to have children, not to have children, and to raise them in a safe and healthy environment.” In defining “reproductive justice,” Drucker draws on scholar-activists Loretta J. Ross and Ricki Sollinger, Reproductive Justice (2017). Published as part of the MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge Series, which produces overviews of contemporary topics to foster a “principled understanding of the world,” Contraception is highly readable and publicly engaged. Arguing that “contraception is never a neutral technology,” it draws on a robust scholarship in reproductive history and feminist technology studies to emphasize the sociopolitical factors that have conditioned the ways people avoid pregnancy. Drucker moves from local, grassroots activities and intimate behaviors to large-scale political campaigns. As the examples above suggest, Drucker’s expansive view of contraceptive technologies implies how a justice-oriented framework might not only inform technology, but also push scholars to reimagine the category of technology.

The author traces the beginnings of modern contraception, not to the manufacture of condoms or the hormonal pill, but to the Mensinga diaphragm and the clinic that fitted and distributed them in Amsterdam in 1882. Aletta Jacobs—the Dutch feminist and physician who ran the clinic —enabled a system whereby women could control reproduction through the clinical provision of contraceptive devices. Jacobs’s clinic was also deeply embedded in a neo-Malthusian movement that promoted contraceptive devices to control population growth. By beginning with this historical moment, Drucker establishes the ambiguous nature of contraception: the same technologies that enabled freedom from pregnancy and increased sexual pleasure and satisfaction were also used for eugenic purposes—to enforce political agendas and limit the reproductive freedom of certain groups along racist and classist lines.

Despite Jacobs’s presence as a pioneer of modern contraception, the book avoids any linear or reverent narrative of contraceptive technology. In fact, Drucker’s discussion of Jacobs serves to decenter the United States and certain figures who dominate conventional narratives, like Margaret Sanger, the famous American feminist and birth control advocate. Drucker recounts Sanger’s eagerness to learn from Jacobs how to fit and distribute diaphragms, despite their prohibition in the United States by the Comstock Act. When Sanger traveled to Amsterdam, Jacobs coolly refused to meet her because Sanger was not a physician. [End Page 950]

With snapshots like these, and Drucker’s overall comparative perspective, the reader is made aware of the complex power dynamics shaping access to contraception, but also that there is no direct line between feminist movements and the introduction of certain contraceptive devices. Modern contraception, Drucker observes, is just as rooted in political economy and the standardization of medicine as it is in shifting gender relations. A comparative study of introducing the hormonal pill in the 1960s—a watershed in the history of contraception—reveals that the hormonal method did not necessarily create or even overlap with a “Sexual Revolution.” Indeed, the pill’s impact varied remarkably by context. In Lawrence, Kansas, the hormonal pill was available at clinics only to married women for over a decade; that is until feminist health activists staged a sit-in at a university health center to demand access for unmarried women, challenging moral norms that condemned extramarital sex. Meanwhile, in Eastern bloc countries, the hormonal pill was an expensive Western export. Russian officials emphasized the harmful...