antiz’s Reviews > Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World > Status Update

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being policed in reproductive propaganda.”

In 1905 the word hormone was introduced, meaning ‘setting in motion’ in Ancient Greek.
But it became that women were to do certain things to optimise their internal secretions (their hormones) via good mental outlook, social life and diet (etc) to optimise their child.
“Four centuries after the bonkers belief that birth defects were caused by women’s depraved dreams and desires, women’s minds were still …

But who decides who is good enough to reproduce? This thinking is often shrouded in racism and ableism, that white women without disease are the only women worthy of reproduction.

But other ‘mentally defective’ women were sterilised against their will.
Buck vs Bell is a case from the late 1920s. Carrie Buck was a woman in a mental institution who had a daughter conceived through rape, and her own mother was a rumoured prostitute. Dr Bell is the superintendent who ruled that ‘three generations of imbeciles were enough’, leading to the removal of Buck’s fallopian tubes.

The idea of preventing pregnancy in ‘inferior’ women, prevalent in the ideas of the women leading the contraception movement, lead to the discussion of sterilisation in women deemed to be mentally or physically defective. A bill was drafted by the British Eugenics Society in 1931 suggesting that ‘mental defectives’ undergo compulsory sterilisation, but this bill did not pass.

However, Sanger’s suggestion that women could use contraception to avoid unwanted pregnancies, especially for those struggling economically, eventually became eugenics-like.

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…it was attended by an undercover policewoman, and the clinic was raided and Sanger and Byrne arrested.

(Really shows that the law is not always what is morally correct - just what was socially acceptable at the time)

The law still ascertained that information and sex and conception not be circulated in the post (Comstock Laws). However, Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethyl Byrne released flyers aimed at those living in the overpopulated lower east side in NYC, urging the women who didn’t want or couldn’t afford large families to attend a clinic. Hundreds attended, receiving information about conception. But after 10 days…

Female activists hailed conception as a way for women to actually enjoy sex as they’d avoid pregnancy fears. It would also allow women and families to reduce economic hardship by controlling the number of children they had. Without conception, many women sought ‘back-alley’ abortions to control their number of offspring, which were dangerous and sometimes deadly.