In Our Control: The Complete Guide to Contraceptive Choices for Women

By Laura Eldridge
Seven Stories Press

The pill is turning fifty this year, and article upon article is being written trumpeting how hormonal contraception has revolutionized women’s lives. While this is true, perhaps the bigger story is how for many women, the pill is the default contraceptive option – despite potential side effects or inconveniences.

Laura Eldridge wants to change that. Believing that women should take control of their contraceptive health by looking at the political, medical, and social implications of birth control, she set out to write a book that both challenged and informed women about something so few of us actually talk about. Her final product, In Our Control, brings a straightforward, nonjudgmental, and honest look at the pill, the patch, the ring, and, yes, even fertility awareness methods.

In Our Control isn’t content to simply discuss contraceptive options as if they exist in a vacuum. Instead, Eldridge traces the history of birth control development, painting a backdrop of the political context and gender inequalities that are inextricably intertwined with each birth control option.

Nuanced discussions of medical side effects and precautions are deftly arranged between critiques of the medical-industrial complex. Eldridge walks readers through the thought process within her critiques, which allows the reader to become a smart consumer of contraceptive options. For example, her discussion of the HPV vaccination and the pharmaceutical industry’s rush to push it to the public is critical, yet evenhanded and well researched. The chapter on menstrual suppression drugs casts a wary eye towards the way feminist themes of empowerment have been misappropriated in advertising for such products.

While In Our Control's main focus is on a discussion of contraceptive options, I felt the book really shined in its final chapters on the HPV vaccination, birth control options for men, environmental concerns about contraception, and international issues in contraception. It was in these chapters that Eldridge combined her inquisitive and unorthodox style of writing with a critical look at contemporary issues in contraception. I found myself unable to put the book down through these chapters.

Eldridge’s fresh voice was apparent on every page of In Our Control, and evoked the pro-woman, community-oriented feel of a volume of Our Bodies, Ourselves. By placing exhaustive information about contraception into the hands of her readers, Eldridge is ensuring that women can approach their health professionals fully armed with all of their options, enabling them to have an honest conversation about which method is best for them.

Review by Gwen Emmons

Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill

By Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Duke University Press

Professor Gabriela Soto Laveaga’s newest monograph, Jungle Laboratories, is a telling history that unravels the transnational political economy of barbasco yam production in Mexico from its discovery to its use in the early medicalization of synthetic hormonal steroids that created the birth control pill. According to Laveaga, the developing country context of the Pill’s history was so successfully erased from history that even the “peasant” culture in Oaxaca has allegedly forgotten its own crucial role in one of the past century’s most important scientific breakthroughs. Part of what Marxist theorists would call the “false consciousness” of history is revealed in this book.

Although production of synthetic hormones in Mexico predated World War I, controlling the barbasco trade in the the early to mid-1970s became a national project for the Mexican government. After reading Jungle Laboratories, I got the sense that “making the pill” was part of a larger initiative of “making a nation” consisting of “biocitizens” who were not just part of elite scientific knowledge production but were also expected to self-regulate their own population growth as part of President Luis Echeverría’s vision of a new Mexico.

While women were targeted for birth control campaigns, “male campesinos were encouraged to read agrarian law and technical manuals to become better and more productive citizens.” It is clear from these examples that women were positioned as part of the "population problem" to be acted upon by policies, whereas men were seen as the future policymakers and the population empowered by educational campaigns. Although the author could have written a feminist analysis of the nationalist projects, she did not; this is my own feminist reading taken from separate examples in the text that were separated by almost a hundred pages in Laveaga's book.

In general, Laveaga could have drawn out more of a critical analysis. The introduction gave an anthropologist like me high hopes for the inclusion of social theories ranging from Nikolas Rose’s biocitizenship to Michael Taussig’s theories on the layering of history and the magic of the state. However, with the exception of a couple of mentions, the theoretical underpinnings to this story were almost invisible. Given its gripping narrative, and implications for social theories pulled from elsewhere, Laveaga’s book is a good buy for an undergraduate curriculum such as reproductive health and medical anthropology. It is also an engaging read for women who are curious about the political economy of the pills they are popping on a daily basis.

Review by Maya N. Vaughan-Smith