In January of this year, Carl Djerassi, dubbed “father of the Pill,” passed away. He once believed he worked to liberate women, but in 2010 interview, he said, “Modern, intelligent men won’t take responsibility, wouldn’t even use condoms,” he said. “They shrugged and said: ‘All women are now on the pill, I don’t need to bother.’ This has become another woman’s burden.”
Please read the following articles before reading this blog post: Some young evangelicals forgo birth control and a radical feminist review of Holly Grigg-Spall’s book Sweetening the Pill.
Birth control has been and is paraded by mainstream feminists as a “miracle drug” essential to furthering the equality of men and woman, but fringe movements, including those based in religion to race, protest.
Grigg-Spall…critiques the way HBC is set up as a solution to worldwide “population control” when the real issue is global inequality and poverty. The pill is a capitalist solution to this, and not a feminist one.
I personally agree that the premise of birth control and what it aims to achieve is problematic. I believe that the first step of equality is accepting that equality of men and women does not and cannot exist because men and women have different needs and desires. Therefore, all that can exist is equality of opportunity, which birth control approaches incorrectly.
In a simplified summary, birth control aims to keep a woman’s body’s natural functions at bay for as long as possible so that she can, to some extent, pretend to be a man and further herself in our male dominated society, which created and promotes birth control. But that same body is then pressured to give birth years after it intends to, a potentially harmful process. If a woman doesn’t postpone childbirth, she is essentially worthless in the modern working world.
Birth control is also at the center of politics and capitalism. Some of you may have seen this video before, but if you haven’t, it perfectly highlights much of what is wrong with birth control.
It is expensive, a hotly-debated health care topic, and not necessarily healthy. Grigg-Spall’s discusses “ the “dark side” of the pill.”
Apparently data collected from Bayer concentration camp experiments was used in developing the pill (p 31). The pill has negative side effects for women ranging from promoting bone loss (p 63) to blood clots to depression, etc. The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified the pill as a class one carcinogen alongside tobacco and asbestos (p 59). Apparently, Depo Provera is currently used in sex offender rehab programs to decrease sex drive (p 68).
Dorothy Roberts’ book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, takes a look at birth control through the lens of race. In black communities, coercive dispersion of birth control has been used as a means of controlling poverty without actually dealing with the issue itself. Black incarcerated women have been forcible sterilized. Roberts’ argues that these factors have been an integral part of racial oppression in the U.S..
Birth control also represents some alarming ideological ideals, as expressed by the first article.
Why do so many women feel pressure to postpone childbearing until the last possible biological moment? Why do stable couples fear that a child will ruin their lives? And why has our culture put more energy into extending women’s fertility window than into remaking the workplace to accommodate parenthood?
Instead of promoting these twisted ideals—along with the problematic health and racial side effects of birth control—shouldn’t we be promoting workplaces that coexist and cooperate with families and supporting the natural biological functions of women’s bodies?
Going back to Djerassi’s quote, shouldn’t men have more responsibility in birth control? Some argue that giving women full control is necessary, because they often bear full consequences of a man’s failure to use birth control.
But perhaps the problem isn’t that the woman has to bear all consequences, perhaps it’s that we live in a society that not only considers children a consequence, but a society that makes children a consequence. No one will say that being a single mother is an easy task.
So is birth control feminist?*
*I would just like to say that the opinions and view point expressed above, both in my post and in the above articles, are not necessarily my own views and opinions. However, I do think that they are worth exploring and worth thinking critically about. Perhaps my question, “is birth control feminist,” is misleading, because it seems like I don’t think it is. This isn’t true–of course, it’s feminist and empowering in that it liberates women sexually and allows them to take control of their sexuality. But this isn’t the only use of the birth control pill. I would encourage you expand your concept of the pill beyond how you use it and how it applies to someone like you–specifically a woman married to a man (or in a relationship like marriage in the sense that it is mutually committed and long-term, if you object to the idea of marriage) that is pursuing a professional career. Consider this article. If we agree that a women’s professional life should not be judged on the presence of a family, particularly children, then does birth control support this belief? And only in the case of a woman with a professional career who chooses, supposedly of her own free will, to postpone childbirth, is that choice really her own? If society were more open to the idea that a woman, like a man, can have a family and also succeed in the workplace, would she have to postpone childbirth?
Feminism and Women's Bodies 