the Female Body GOVERNING

The Pill in Puerto Rico and the Mainland United States 161
prescribed in nonexperimental settings as an “off label” use of a drug
that was approved by the FDA only for “menstrual irregularities.” This
story got lost in the 1960s as researchers hastened to defend themselves
against the charge that they had illegitimately used Puerto Rico as a
laboratory of dispensable bodies for the benefi t of First World women.
Yet an exploration of the moment of the development of the Pill, the ways
physicians and researchers described its benefi ts when it came under
attack, and the history of birth control in Puerto Rico shows that the
testing was done there because Third World women were the population
for whom the Pill was intended. As we think these days about the ethics
of AIDS drug testing by U.S. fi rms overseas, it bears remembering that
the effects of the globalization of drug testing and medical research
are never simply contained “over there,” but infl uence the treatment of
working-class people in the United States, and sometimes even middleclass
and affl uent people.
My intent is certainly not to suggest that “over there” one has questions
of race, colonialism, development, and poverty, while in places such as
the United States, one encounters “women” and issues of gender and
feminism. At the same time, to reiterate an argument of two decades of
feminist scholarship on race, it is important to note how “women” are
differentially imbricated in webs of meaning about race and nation.
For example, one of the architects of the Pill research in Puerto Rico,
Clarence Gamble, promoted very different policies and practices for
women based on race, class, and region. He vigorously promoted
“simple” methods for “simple” people, backing contraceptive foam in
Puerto Rico rather than the diaphragm because, he believed, it was
easier to use (Williams & Williams, 1978, p. 4). At the same time, he
was writing articles for medical journals on the problem of the “college
birthrate”—that college-educated men and women were having too
few children (1947). He wrote of a project to promote birth control in
Puerto Rico that it was:
designed to discover whether our present means of birth control,
intensively applied, can control the dangerously expanding population
of an unambitious and unintelligent group . . . it has been said
that birth control has been injurious to the race since it has been
used by the intelligent and foresighted. It seems to me that only by
some . . . demonstration can this accusation be refuted and our nation
protected from an undue expansion of the unintelligent groups.
(C. Gamble to Youngs Rubber Corporation, personal communication,
March 24, 1947)