The IUD: how life and death is controlled by the market

Screenshot of video by The Radiance Foundation

The origins of the IUD and its journey throughout the world has been laden with tension and politics. Especially highlighted in the story of the IUD are the differences in power between scientific experts and women, and that between "untouchable" material/intellectual elites and "the masses." When the IUD was first developed and produced on a large scale by actors in the Global North, its consumption was intended for the Global South in the name of population control. It was soon enough revealed that the research and development on the project was rather lacking, meaning that relevant research (such as the varying sizes and shapes of actual uteruses) was not conducted, informed consent was not contracted, and that while the device was "proven" to work, scientists still didn't know how. Such oversights had detrimental impacts as thousands of women were left with infections and other complications that often impacted not only their physical health but also their emotional and mental wellbeing. As knowledge of the potential dangers of the IUD spread among both civilians and doctors, the prevalence of the IUD on the contraceptive market ebbed and flowed before becoming firmly reestablished (in some places) as being a legitimate method to prevent pregnancy. 

The history of the IUD is indeed much richer than this brief summary, and reveals many cases of technological violence against the female body as well as cases of liberation and empowerment. However, amongst the thorns and flowers of this ongoing story, there is a deep and concerning truth revealed regarding who has the capacity to chose, and more specifically, chose not only what may happen to their own body, but also what may happen to the bodies of others. If we look at the key ideological and financial players behind the IUD in both the past and present, we will find a list of organizations including: The Population Council, The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Guttmacher Institute, International Planned Parenthood Federation, the United Nations, USAID, and major pharmaceutical companies. All of these organizations are comprised of unelected "elite" individuals that are not held accountable by the general populous. These organizations are all also based within the Global North, yet seek to control life in the Global South. Further evidence of this lies in the fact that some individuals (6 out of 10) who sit on the demographic and advisory board of The Population Council have past associations with eugenics. By funding the development of the IUD and strategically imposing contraceptive technologies on certain groups, these private organizations have had the capacity to decide who will live and who will die, what bodies are disposable and what bodies are valuable, who shall be subjected to science and who will retain autonomy.

The IUD's roots are in the desire to control the reproduction cycles of brown, black, poor, female bodies with the IUD and similar technologies. The Population Council and this ideology exists (unchecked and with real consequences) today. To be sure, while explicit mentions of eugenics have become increasingly taboo, the ideology rooted in an ability to control the demographics of the global population as a whole is still alive today and it continues to be funded and controlled by a small group of private organizations. The Guttmacher Institute, for example, is an independent organization which has recently been funded in part by the MacArthur Foundation for R&D on contraception and reproduction to be done on and for women in India, Latin America, and Africa. The Guttmacher Institute also originated from Planned Parenthood, which helps contextualize a video released by The Radience Foundation in 2011. In the video, data is presented that supports the claim that Planned Parenthood targets black urban areas with abortion clinics, a form of population control that seeks to decrease the number of poor black babies coming into the world. The coalition calls this phenomena getting Guttmachere'd. 

Regardless of the morality of eugenics and population control as an ideology and set of practices, the fact that a small number of key players backed by a lot of dollars were able to come together and effectively alter human lives and bodies beyond their own, all while beyond the control and oversight of the populous in which they seek to impact is concerning. This story gives us a glimpse into the world of neoliberalism and the free market- if you have enough money, you can do anything. The problem is that the general public has very little control over the practices of the organizations that prevail in the market, even when the decisions of those organizations may impact all of our lives greatly. 

Resources:

Guttmacher Institute. MacArthur Foundation , www.macfound.org/grantees/356/

.

Novielli, Carole. “The Population Council Has a Shocking 65-Year History, and It's Nothing to Celebrate.” Live Action, 14 Nov. 2017, liveaction.whiteboard.is/news/population-council-founded-eugenicists-promoting-abortion-turns-65/.

Takeshita, Chikako. The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women's Bodies. The MIT Press, 2012.

“We've Been Guttmacher'd.” The Radiance Foundation, The Radiance Foundation, 1 Apr. 2017, www.theradiancefoundation.org/portfolio-posts/weve-been-guttmacherd/.