the Female Body GOVERNING

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laura briggs
In spite of the fact that it is women who are taking the Pill and
taking the risks, it was the legislators, the doctors, and the drug
company’s [sic] representatives, all men of course, who were testifying
and dissecting women as if they were no more important than the
laboratory animals they work with every day. (Tone, 1997, p. 235)
This wasn’t strictly accurate; in the 1940s and 1950s, as we have
seen, feminists associated with PPFA, such as Calderone, McCormick,
and Sanger, backed the development and testing of the Pill. Yet the
attitude of Washington’s Women’s Liberation was typical of a new
generation of feminists who found themselves very much at odds with
the medical and regulatory community’s complacence over the side
effects of the Pill. In part, this anti-Pill activism emerged out of U.S.
women’s own experiences with the Pill’s side effect, but it also refl ected
a growing unwillingness by U.S. feminists to take arguments about
overpopulation at face value. In subsequent years, a sharp critique of
overpopulation arguments as eugenics emerged in activist groups and
a new women’s studies scholarship (Gordon, 1977; Hartmann, 1995;
Mass, 1977).
The thromboembolis crisis was ultimately resolved to the satisfaction
of researchers in the 1960s as a statistical artifact of the fact that in
this period, North American and British women who took the Pill were
disproportionately also more likely to be smokers. Nevertheless, some
newer studies continue to show that despite continual changes in dosage
and “estrogen” and “progestin” compounding, women who take the Pill
continue to show far higher rates—from three to fi ve times higher—of
thromboembolism (Drife, 2002). Other researchers argue that these
studies show little more than that Pill users are not typical of the general
population of women and that these statistics show correlation, rather
cause (Ory, 1996). In fact, the shape of the debate has not changed
much in the intervening decades. In the long run, whether the Pill is
safe remains unclear. Many continue to suggest, much as Satterthwaite
did in the 1950s, that the use of oral contraceptives—like hormone
replacement therapy—causes increased risk of gynecological and breast
cancers (Collins & Schlesselman, 2002). It is certainly less safe than
the boldest claims made for it—Pincus at one time insisted that its
use in fact lowered cancer rates (Reed, 1974). More than anything,
however, researchers were simply lucky that it did not cause devastating,
widespread ill effects. DES, for example, did. Researchers simply had no
way of knowing. What they believed and what they argued, however, was
that it was safer than the threat posed by too many Third World bodies,
with their penchant for Communism and their poverty.