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Welcome back to the reading club!

In the most recent episode of the Human Machine — Kieran Yates’ look at smartphones as an extension of the mind—one thing that came up was trust. If you’re putting a part of yourself into a machine, how can you know to trust it?

The people who design smartphones want to influence what we do with them, after all, and so do the people who design apps and websites. The next area we’ll be exploring in this series, and this reading group, is also one heavily influenced by issues of trust, and also of control: contraceptives, and in particular, the pill.

We could focus in on any one of a number of different types of contraceptives, from condoms to IUDs to vasectomies. They’re all technologies that we use to shape the process of creating new humans, stopping and starting it according our schedule, not nature’s. We’re going to focus on the pill, which has had a massive impact on the world over the past half century. The first oral contraceptive pill trial was in 1956, four years before the word “cyborg” was coined, and just as much a creation of that era’s particular blend of technological ambition and human hubris — finally, human fertility could be turned on or off at will!

This was the fertility of women, of course, and that’s crucial to the the story of the pill. Pharmaceutical companies knew about the theoretical possibility of the pill for 40 years, but didn’t see the value in spending money on developing it — and when it finally came to market, it was explicitly not meant to be used to prevent pregnancies, but rather to treat fertility disorders. Its creators and marketers were largely men, who designed the dosing schedule around their ideal of “healthy” menstruation.
 
A typical early contraceptive pill case, designed to look like a cosmetics case and appear unassuming in a handbag.
Image credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Despite the intentions of its creators, its impact has been enormous—It’s credited with giving women more power over their own bodies, their family planning choices, and their relationships with men. But still, it’s a pill for women. There’s meant to be a pill for men in the works—it’s been coming for a very long time now, but it never seems to get any closer. Hannah Harris Green will be exploring some of the reasons why on September 12, in the next episode of the Human Machine.

In the meantime, here’s what’s on the list for this week’s edition of the reading club—on the subject of people taking control of their reproductive biology:
 
  • READ: Malcolm Gladwell on John Rock's Error—namely, that the monthly on/off pill cycle is largely arbitrary, down to a Catholic scientist trying to pre-empt the Church's opposition to a new contraceptive. This fudge has led to a number of the dangerous knock-on side effects that the pill is now known (or suspected) to have, and also to false health scares too:

    “Today, the Pill is still often sold in dial packs and taken in twenty-eight-day cycles. It remains, in other words, a drug shaped by the dictates of the Catholic Church–by John Rock’s desire to make this new method of birth control seem as natural as possible. This was John Rock’s error. He was consumed by the idea of the natural. But what he thought was natural wasn’t so natural after all, and the Pill he ushered into the world turned out to be something other than what he thought it was. In John Rock’s mind the dictates of religion and the principles of science got mixed up, and only now are we beginning to untangle them.”
     
  • READ: This pamphlet from Planned Parenthood (The Birth Control Pill—A History) is an excellent round-up of pretty much every factual detail you might want about the development, release, impact, and general science of the contraceptive pill. Featuring stats on changes in workforce participation for women, through to health scares real and unfounded:

    “In 1993, The Economist named the birth control pill one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World because, 'When the history of the 20th century is written, it may be seen as the first [time] when men and women were truly partners. Wonderful things can come in small packets.”

    One thing about this: there are valid reasons to be critical of the earliest birth control pill researchers for how they conducted experiments on poor women in Puerto Rico, which this document rejects.
     
  • READ: So, as a counterpoint to Planned Parenthood's hagiography of the researchers responsible for the pill is this piece, “The Dark History of Birth Control You Haven't Heard” by Marcie Bianco at Mic: 

    “The irony of the pill is that it was tested on women, specifically women of color — many of whom were forced to undergo sterilization — before later being marketed predominately to white women in America as a symbol of independence.”

As always, we'll be discussing this topic over at the Human Machine group on Facebook—let me know what you think!

Until next time,
Ian

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