Double, Double, Coil and Trouble: The History of Female Contraceptives and the Pursuit of Profit at the Expense of Women’s Health

By Ella Stoneley

When the oral contraceptive pill came out, it was lauded as a miracle. In some ways, it was. It allowed families to decide how many children they wanted; it afforded women agency over their bodies. We should not, however, believe that the pill was (and still is) without drawbacks. This ‘miracle’ has a rather nasty history of coercion, misogyny, and malpractice, not to mention the lengthy and dangerous list of side effects. 

When the Astra-Zeneca vaccine was suspended from use in multiple EU countries recently due to fears that it causes blood clots, many women were shocked at the speed at which it was pulled. Higher risk of blood clots, and by extension stroke, is something that every woman who takes an oral contraceptive pill accepts, though sometimes unknowingly. 

The torrid history of female contraceptives is part of a wider issue of women’s health not being afforded the same respect as men’s. The roots of this issue can be traced back to the witch craze. In Silvia Federici’s book Caliban and The Witch, Federici argues that the transition from feudalism to capitalism occurs around the time of the witch craze. This transition turned many women's bodies into a tool of capitalist accumulation in a way that they weren’t before. Capitalism has a vested interest in population maintenance and increase, as it is the children of today that are the labour force of tomorrow. Because of this, those who hold power in a capitalist system are concerned about control over the lives of those who can carry children. The shift to capitalism came alongside the scientific revolution and dominance of Cartesian beliefs, which caused traditional beliefs in witchcraft as well as magic more generally to falter. What is important here is that encompassed within these changes is the shifting of medicinal knowledge out of the hands of women and into the hands of men. 

The witch trials have often been seen as an enforcement of this change as, increasingly, older wise women were targeted as witches because of their knowledge of traditional remedies that they would distribute to the poorer in society. Science was to be the domain of privileged men only. Healthcare, as it pertains to the female sex, started to be disrespected. For years women had taken care of their own health in ways that may not have been ‘scientific’ but were not without a basis in reality. They were not invited to join in the scientific revolution, and their knowledge was not respected in the transition. Instead, women were condemned as witches and killed. 

The dangers and consequences of this combination of misogyny and capitalism are shocking. ‘Yaz’ is a contraceptive pill that contains the synthetic progesterone, drospirenone. When Yaz first came out, it was marketed as a lot more than birth control. Youthful colours and adverts that promised clear skin and an extra pep made it the most used form of oral contraceptive in the US for a time. Fairly quickly, the FDA started to raise concerns that drospirenone, though effective, was significantly more dangerous than other synthetic hormones. They called a meeting to discuss its safety, where families of previously healthy young women testified to their sudden deaths. The only outcome was an inclusion of a stroke risk warning halfway through the 33-page safety leaflet. 

Perhaps more insidious is the history of the Dalkon Shield, an IUD. The Dalkon Shield caused the deaths and sterilisation of many women through design flaws that allowed harmful bacteria to grow in the uterus. Court testimony shows that this design flaw was known as a risk in 1970, six months before the shield went on the market. Why was it allowed on the market at all? Why were three million women exposed to this risk? The answer lies in cost. To admit to the design flaw would mean further manufacturing costs; profit was prioritised over people. Eventually, the company could no longer sell the Dalkon Shield in a western market. In an attempt to not lose money on this dangerous product, the company shipped their stock of Shields to the developing world. They did so in collaboration with the US government, and did not even sterilise the products to reduce costs. This story that starts in control of female bodies for capitalist accumulation of labour ends in the ruin of female bodies for capitalist accumulation of profit. 

The risks women face while taking forms of birth control are simply accepted as worth it. We know that besides the life-limiting risks, the side effects of birth control can be intense and wide-ranging, from headaches to weight gain, strong depression to nausea – all of which can have a detrimental impact on day-to-day life. Women buy birth control anyway because there is no other choice to keep themselves protected from unintended pregnancy or to deal with endometriosis, acne, or PCOS. There has been little development of these contraceptives because there is no financial incentive to do so. Women’s pain is also generally taken less seriously than the pain of men, to the point that women wait longer in A&E and are given weaker pain relief. Perhaps here we can draw a comparison between the disrespect of women’s knowledge in the wake of the scientific revolution to the disrespect of women’s knowledge of their own pain.

It may seem too long a reach back into the past to find the reasoning for this in the witch trials, and there have certainly been other significant developments that I haven’t touched on. It is, however, easy to see links between the discrediting of the traditionally female medicinal practices, the capitalistic attitude that developed towards female bodies, and the continued pursuit of profit at the expense of female health.

Sources:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56440139

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, (New York: Autonomedia, 1998)

Peter Elmer, ‘Science and witchcraft’ in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. By Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Women: our history (London: DK, 2019)

Sex Explained: Birth Control’ (Vox, 2020) available on Netflix.

Dana Casciotti PHD, Diana Zuckerman PHD, Juliana Stebbins, ‘Are some birth controls too risky.’ from the National Centre for Health Research. (2015)

Robin Marantz, ‘The Dalkon Shield Disaster,’ The Washington Post, (November 1985)

Mark Dowie, Barbara Ehrenreich, Stephen Minkin, ‘The Charge: Gynocide.’ in Mother Jones (November/December 1979)

Jennifer Billock, ‘Pain Bias: The health inequality rarely discussed’ BBC Future, (May 2018)