Would you like to be on the receiving end of a snakeskin condom?

Though birth control became legal in the U.S. relatively recently, through the efforts of feminist and other activists, women have invented and employed a plethora of barrier birth control methods throughout human history. Women’s contraceptive inventions include the use of a squeezed out lemon half inserted like a diaphragm. Women were more concerned than men with pregnancy prevention. In fact, originally men used condoms not to prevent pregnancy but to protect themselves from disease. Casanova used a linen condom, the comfort of which does not compare to “the box,” a six-sided concaved wooden object that women inserted into their bodies hoping to block semen.

Today, there are only three male contraception technologies: (1) withdrawal; (2) condoms; and (3) vasectomy. But there are numerous contraceptive technologies that involve women’s bodies and women’s efforts: (1) spermicidal foam; (2) jellies; (3) female condoms; (4) diaphragms; (5) IUDs; (6) birth control pills; and (7) tubal ligation—and this is not an exhaustive list.

Over the past 40 years, medical technology has introduced three types of hormonal contraception to women, which control reproduction by inhibiting or stopping ovulation. These are: the birth control pill (taken every day), Depo-Provera shots (given by a health-care provider every three months), and NorPlant implants (implanted surgically every five years). These recent technologies have forever changed what it’s like to be a reproductive-aged woman. While many women suffer various forms of side effects from these methods, many women also embrace them as convenient, reliable, and liberating.

These forms of birth control give the woman (rather than her sexual partner) a say in her reproductive outcome. Using a hormonal form of birth control does not require the participation or permission of a male partner. At the same time, these forms of birth control have been used to control women’s reproduction as well. For example, primarily poor and black female prisoners in the U.S. have been offered NorPlant implants as a condition of getting parole. And, NorPlant costs $300-$700 for the first year and does not include the cost of removal (which must be done surgically) in case of side effects. Poor women can thus be coerced into semi-permanent birth-control use. Is that the reproductive freedom promised by these new technologies?

Furthermore, when will medical research offer hormonal or other methods by which men can risk side effects to make themselves temporarily sterile?

Suggested Reading:
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. NY: Vintage Books, 1999.

Sheila Jeffries, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. NY: NYU Press, 1991.