On October 20 over 200 angry women and men from the community and the coalition packed the regularly scheduled County Board meeting to demand that Dunne’s order be reversed. Although the issue of abortion cutbacks was originally not even on the meeting’s agenda, members of the pro-choice coalition forced the Board to...
Tag - birth control
Three commentaries raise a number of issues concerning current developments in biotechnology research and engineering. We hope these pieces will provoke ongoing discussion of how we as progressive people should respond to these events.
The nine sessions of the conference were each devoted to one topic. Following the format of the conference, the two volumes are divided into nine sections, each of which consists of short formal papers, responses to those papers and discussions. The first volume, Birth Control and Controlling Birth, covers the...
In this article I will discuss the transition from eugenics to population control as it occurred in the work of one man, Raymond Pearl (1879-1940). Pearl is a useful and important figure for several reasons. He was a well-known biologist with a considerable reputation both in the United States and abroad. In the early...
Fertility Consciousness, the recognition of times in a woman's menstrual cycle when she is potentially fertile, is something that all women can learn and is every woman's right. "Common knowledge" about fertility has been lost through the isolation of women from each other and the medicalization of women's...
The following is testimony presented on behalf of the National Women's Health Network, at the March 8, 1978, Hearings on Contraceptive Research before the Select Committee on Population of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In the past few years much energy and enthusiasm has been directed towards the supposedly new idea of extending the comparative study of animal social systems to human social systems. However, we of the Sociobiology Study Group see this movement as the latest reappearance of a much older doctrine of biological...
As the birth control clinic movement mushroomed around the country, conflict raged about how and by whom the clinics should be controlled. Margaret Sanger still resisted relinquishing personal control of her New York clinic to the medical profession. No doubt part of her resistance came from a desire to control things...
A feminist perspective would not hail new technological developments as "liberating" because it would realize that the oppression of women is not the result of biology but of the social constructs around it. In this respect, it is paradoxical that the excesses of an impersonal technology developed by males in a sexist...
There are many assumptions implicit in the argument for population control which are either questionable or outright nonsense from the point of view of radical political economy, and therefore many “radicals” have denounced the entire concept. After centuries of rapacious exploitation of the world’s peoples and...