Donna J. Drucker, Contraception: A Concise HistoryClaire L. Jones, The Business of Birth Control: Contraception and Commerce in Britain before the Sexual RevolutionJessica Borge, Protective Practices: A History of the London Rubber Company and the Condom BusinessCaroline Rusterholz, Women’s Medicine: Sex, Family Planning and British Female Doctors in Transnational Perspective
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Looking back at the 2020s, historians of medicine might consider the decade a galvanising moment for research and publications about reproduction. Histories of contraception, fertility, sex, family planning, menstruation and abortion have all increasingly appeared in monographs, PhD thesis, and research projects. In hindsight, future historians will perhaps not be surprised. At a time when reproduction has become highly politicised across the world yet again, abortion becomes a crime, mobile apps hand over menstrual tracking data to courts, frozen embryos are consider persons and the childless become villains, it is not strange that academics should want to document what led to this moment and do so now. So how did we get here? New publications on reproductive history in Britain and the USA tell a story heavily centred on the last 200 years. In that period, contraception, reproduction, and fertility options became increasingly medicalized, commercialised and available. But when these technologies and medicines came under attack from politicians seeking to increase the ‘right kind’ of population and decrease everyone else, those same companies that offered you ribbed condoms, menstrual suppression techniques, and Lippes loops could not save you from the reduction of your rights. Contraceptive technologies are at the heart of a number of contemporary scandals, including the Intra-Uterine Device (IUD)-eugenics campaign organised by Denmark towards Inuit girls and women in Greenland. Contraceptives, Donna Drucker argues in her new book, Contraception: A Concise History, is never a neutral technology. And it is never not important.
Source: Social History of Medicine
DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkaf045
Author: Camilla Mørk Røstvik
Institution: University of Agder
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4410764926