The Global Biopolitics of the IUD

The intrauterine device (IUD) is used by 150 million women around the world. It isthe second most prevalent method of female fertility control in the global South and the third mostprevalent in the global North. Over its five decades of use, the IUD has been viewed both as a meansfor women's reproductive autonomy and as coercive tool of state-imposed population control, as aconvenient form of birth control on a par with the pill and as a threat to women's health. In thisbook, Chikako Takeshita investigates the development, marketing, and use of the IUD since the 1960s.She offers a biography of a multifaceted technological object through a feminist science studieslens, tracing the transformations of the scientific discourse around it over time and acrossdifferent geographies. Takeshita describes how developers of the IUD adapted to different socialinterests in their research and how changing assumptions about race, class, and female sexualityoften guided scientific inquiries. The IUD, she argues, became a "politically versatiletechnology," adaptable to both feminist and nonfeminist reproductive politics because ofresearchers' attempts to maintain the device's suitability for women in both the developing and thedeveloped world. Takeshita traces the evolution of scientists' concerns--from contraceptive efficacyand product safety to the politics of abortion--and describes the most recent, hormone-releasing,menstruation-suppressing iteration of the IUD. Examining fifty years of IUD development and use,Takeshita finds a microcosm of the global political economy of women's bodies, health, and sexualityin the history of this contraceptive device.

Chikako Takeshita is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Riverside.