This paper draws on the history of the birth control pill in Sri Lanka to illustrate how the broader global discourse of population control was played out in the Sri Lankan national context. Utilising a cross reading of research reports and correspondence between local and international family planning pioneers such as Gregory Pincus, Clarence Gamble, John Rock and Siva Chinnatamby, I show how Sri Lanka became a laboratory for global pill trials. This prompted a discussion on contraception that revolved around morality and ethnicity resulting in the pill being labelled vanda pethi (sterility pills) by the 1960s. Vanda pethi became Mithuri (female friend) through the IPPF funded programme on social marketing of contraceptives in 1974. Analysing this programme I show how the women’s bodies of Sri Lanka became the ground on which ethnic politics at the local level, and liberal market forces at the global level, were played out through the introduction of the pill.
...More
Book
May, Elaine Tyler;
(2010)
America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation
(/isis/citation/CBB001031593/)
Article
Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel;
(2010)
From Breakthrough to Bust: The Brief Life of Norplant, the Contraceptive Implant
(/isis/citation/CBB001031786/)
Article
Necochea López, Raúl;
(2014)
Gambling on the Protestants: The Pathfinder Fund and Birth Control in Peru, 1958--1965
(/isis/citation/CBB001420185/)
Article
Megan Blair;
(2020)
“Babies Needn’t Follow”: Birth Control and Abortion Policy and Activism at the University of Waterloo and Waterloo Lutheran University, 1965–74
(/isis/citation/CBB413039062/)
Article
Rodríguez-Ocaña, Esteban;
Ignaciuk, Agata;
Ortiz-Gómez, Teresa;
(2012)
Ovulostáticos y anticonceptivos. El conocimiento médico sobre “la píldora” en España durante el franquismo y la transición democrática (1940--1979)
(/isis/citation/CBB001211102/)
Article
Prescott, Heather;
(2013)
The Pill at Fifty: Scientific Commemoration and the Politics of American Memory
(/isis/citation/CBB001320532/)
Article
Laura Kelly;
(2020)
The Contraceptive Pill in Ireland c.1964–79: Activism, Women and Patient–Doctor Relationships
(/isis/citation/CBB546149788/)
Article
Hsiu-Yun Wang;
(2021)
The making of the ‘useless and pathological’ uterus in Taiwan, 1960s to 1990s
(/isis/citation/CBB024712740/)
Article
Felitti, Karina A.;
(2007)
El debate médico sobre anticoncepción y aborto en Buenos Aires en los años sesenta del siglo XX
(/isis/citation/CBB000831361/)
Article
Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel;
(2010)
From Breakthrough to Bust: The Brief Life of Norplant, the Contraceptive Implant
(/isis/citation/CBB001231837/)
Article
DiMoia, John P.;
(2008)
“Let's Have the Proper Number of Children and Raise Them Well!”: Family Planning and Nation-Building in South Korea, 1961--1968
(/isis/citation/CBB000930701/)
Article
Ehrlich, Shoshanna;
(2013)
From Birth Control to Sex Control: Unruly Young Women and the Origins of the National Abstinence-Only Mandate
(/isis/citation/CBB001213536/)
Article
Carranza, María;
(2004)
Sobre una relación “prolífica”: El papel de “la salud” en la propagación de la esterilización contraceptiva en Costa Rica
(/isis/citation/CBB000530320/)
Book
Hannah Dudley-Shotwell;
(2020)
Revolutionizing Women's Healthcare: The Feminist Self-Help Movement in America
(/isis/citation/CBB446855800/)
Article
Malich, Lisa;
(2012)
Vom Mittel der Familienplanung zum differenzierenden Lifestyle-Präparat
(/isis/citation/CBB001420902/)
Chapter
Marks, Lara;
(2000)
Andromeda Freed from her Chains: Attitudes towards Women and the Oral Contraceptive Pill, 1950-1970
(/isis/citation/CBB000101511/)
Article
Cook, Hera;
(2005)
The English Sexual Revolution: Technology and Social Change
(/isis/citation/CBB000670542/)
Article
Potts, Malcolm;
(2003)
Two Pills, Two Paths: A Tale of Gender Bias
(/isis/citation/CBB000600568/)
Article
Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel;
(2011)
The Social Construction of a Contraceptive Technology: An Investigation of the Meanings of Norplant
(/isis/citation/CBB001031785/)
Article
Jeffrey I. Seeman;
(2020)
The back story: Carl Djerassi (1923-2015): The man of multiple lives
(/isis/citation/CBB045986139/)
Be the first to comment!