the Female Body GOVERNING

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(1969) The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill. Out of this controversy activists
founded the National Women’s Health Network, which was and remains
an important source of unofficial information and an organizing center
for lobbying and activism around women’s health issues (McLaughlin,
1982). This controversy was joined to others: the thalidomide tragedy
of 1962, in which a tranquilizer given to pregnant women caused severe
limb deformities in their offspring, and a subsequent disaster with
another hormonal drug, DES, which was administered to pregnant
women to prevent miscarriage and later discovered to cause significant
reproductive health problems for girls born of those pregnancies.
These events together marked the beginning of a kind of women’s
health activism that is still visible, for example in the legal and medical
battle over silicone breast implants (and, as Samantha King argues in
this volume, that has been co-opted in the philanthropists’ campaign
for funding for breast cancer research). Ironically, as Paula Treichler
(1992) has noted, it was in and through these battles over women’s
health that the FDA established regulations that AIDS activists would
work hard to undo).
I want to revisit this foundational moment and the events that led
up to it because our essential paradigms for understanding what was at
stake then are in important ways misleading. Where we have basically
suggested that it was something to do with the dispensability of “women”
as such—a lack of concern about (all) women’s bodies—that allowed
researchers and physicians to encourage healthy women to use an
untried and potentially dangerous medication, this was only part of
the story. It was a struggle constructed also by the belief that many risks
could be taken with contraceptives for working-class and Third World
women, a trajectory in which First World women were in some sense
bystanders. The research on the Pill belonged to a particular cold war
moment, in which technological and scientifi c interventions were quite
explicitly meant to solve economic and political problems, in this case,
Third World poverty and Communism. At a time when the health risks
of estrogenic contraceptives were unknown and the argument for giving
healthy women a potent steroidal medication was quite controversial,
researchers and funders grounded the rationale for the development
of the Pill in overpopulation, the belief that Third World poverty was
caused by excessive childbearing, and that this poverty, in turn, caused
nations to “go over” to Communism. Within a few years, U.S. forces
would be distributing birth control pills in South Vietnam, even as they
dropped napalm on civilian populations in the North (Sheehan, 1988).
The pill’s use by middle-class, First World women was an unintended
and unforeseen consequence of that initial research, and was fi rst