Making the Shot: The Search for an Injectable Contraceptive and the Technopolitics of Birth Control, 1952-1992

• In Event: Innovation and Inequality in Health and Medicine - II

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how Depo-Provera – the first commercially available long-term injectable contraceptive – was created, distributed, and used as a pharmaceutical technology for controlling and reforming non-normative sexualities. By tracking Depo-Provera from its first clinical trials at the McCormick Hospital in Thailand, to its use as a therapeutic intervention for patients at the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic, to its domestic clinical trials at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, this paper studies how anxieties about global overpopulation, teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency, and sex offenders were malleably applied to justify and promote the experimental use of Depo-Provera. In so doing, I explore how the production of Depo-Provera was guided by the ways that doctors, researchers, and lawmakers imagined specific patient populations as ideal drug candidates and, in turn, how political and cultural ideas about excessive reproduction and sexual deviance shaped drug development. I deploy a Feminist STS framework to examine archival and primary source materials from the Upjohn pharmaceutical company, the U.S. federal government, hospitals and mental health facilities, scientific journals, women’s health activists, and newspapers. This paper ultimately reveals how racial, class, and sexual hierarchies structured the creation and dissemination of Depo-Provera, highlighting the promise and perils of experimental medicine and technological innovation.

Author

• Quinn Anex-Ries, University of Southern California