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...
Tag - birth control
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...
Birth control can have three major social purposes: to increase the individual freedom of women; to control overall population trends; and to improve and protect health. When the modern birth control movement began in the early 20th century, the first was its dominant motive. Organizations demanding the legalization...
On the weekend of May 13, 1972, twenty women travelled by bus from Chicago to Philadelphia, to recieve abortions in an out-patient clinic. The women were scheduled to get abortions at Chicago clinics which had just been shut down by the Chicago police. The Philadelphia Women's Health Collective became involved when...
In recent years, both the American government and the "philanthropic" agencies such as IPPF, have exerted continual pressure upon Latin American nations to reduce birth rates. A celebrated case in 1969 was Bolivia, which had recently nationalized Gulf Oil's holdings. When Bolivia, with a population density of less...