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ii. Birth Control Technologies and Agency
Technology has been weaponized to preserve the oikos for the white cis-hetero-patriarchy. The discourse around the topic is intrinsic to the discourse of the Anthropocene, and makes the widespread use of technology and its concurrent exploitation seem inevitable. Of course, technologies whether physical or digital have changed the world for good and for bad, but the silence around the extractive and exploitative effects on marginalized groups renders them as others who exist to be guinea pigs. For example, birth control as a technology has allowed those with uteresus to have agency when there wasn’t any before. But it still remains that the forced sterilizations of Black, Puerto Rican and Indigenous womxn resulted in the technology to exist and provide that agency. 58 It is a highly-gendered technology that is a product of colonial domination through biopolitics. It was not designed to give womxn agency, instead it was designed to answer the discourse of “overpopulation” which serves as a defense for the white Anthropocene by making the womb a space to be conquered and controlled. Hormonal contraceptives have a history of domination and begin as early as the 1940s, when barbasco—a yam that grew in the forests of Mexico—was identified as the cheapest source of progesterone. 59 Due to the debilitating economy at the time, the barbasco trade employed a lot of people in Mexico, and in order to maximize time and the progesterone recovered, the locals devised their own methods of extraction. These methods, even though time- and money-efficient, were criticized by American and German scientists, and the Mexican labour was categorized as “lazy” and “greedy” and not credible enough to be a part of scientific development. The history of this technology began with epistemological colonization, where certain races were deemed inferior in the production of knowledge. 60
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When the pill was being developed and tested in 1952 by Dr. Gregory Pincus and Dr. John Rock, the process revealed an unprecedented phenomenon—after regular use, the subjects would stop menstruating. This was deemed “unacceptable” and was developed such that it would be taken for 21 days, followed by 7 days of break, a cycle that is still followed today. This would result in an induced bleeding that would resemble menstruation. This was artificially engineered into the pill simply because menstruation was a “biological” process without which womxn taking the pill would be stripped of their “female-ness.” 61 This marks another instance of colonized domination that renders bodies as other. It is astounding that even 70 years later, people with uteruses are made to simulate menstruation when taking the pill, simply because two men decided what constitutes a womxn.
58. Sandrine Piorkowski Bocquillon, “Sterilization in the United States: The Dark Side of Contraception,” Revue de recherche en civilisation américaine (Diallo, David, December 17, 2018), https://journals. openedition.org/rrca/1169. 59. Prado de O. Martins, 47. 60. Prado de O. Martins. 48. 61. Ibid, 50.
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Again, this technology needs to be analyzed intersectionally, because it is not only a labour and gendered issue, but also a racialized one. The pill was tested on womxn in Puerto Rico because the side effects were questionable, and the laws in the continental United States prohibited spread of information about contraception. United States politicians and some Puerto Rican ones like Luis Muñoz Marín believed that contraception would help the economic development of the island and address problems of “overpopulation” which in itself is a highly problematic assumption. 62 These trials were carried out on volunteer students in a Medical College in Puerto Rico whose grades were threatened to stop them from dropping out; on patients at Mental Health facilities; on prisoners in Correctional facilities; and on low income communities who were promised housing if they did not drop out. It is vital to note that in some situations, the subjects were not told that they were being tested for contraceptives, but rather were told they were being treated either for infertility or for diseases related to menstruation. They were not warned of any side-effects and when they received complaints, they blamed those on the “emotional super-activity of Puerto Rican women.” 63
This analysis is not to undermine the agency that this technology gives to people with uteresus now, but is rather to note that that was never its intention. The pill was also tested on Palestinian womxn and these tests were celebrated because those developing this knowledge believed that those “polluted” bloodlines needed to be stopped from growing. 64 It is to note that the world has never been designed for anyone other than the colonial standard human, and though marginalized communities are gaining agency from centuries of organizing and dissent, the privileges we enjoy today were created to harm us, and this knowledge is vital to begin to imagine alternative futures.
62. Prado de O. Martins, 51. 63. Ibid, 52. 64. Ibid, 53.
