cover image The Selling of Contraception: The Dalkon Shield Case, Sexuality, and Women's Autonomy

The Selling of Contraception: The Dalkon Shield Case, Sexuality, and Women's Autonomy

Nicole J. Grant. Ohio State University Press, $35 (223pp) ISBN 978-0-8142-0572-3

``It's not a matter of being an informed consumer; it's a matter of being a cynic to save your life,'' comments one of the women here who used the Dalkon Shield, the intrauterine contraceptive device that killed, maimed, made infertile or simply sickened women in the U.S. and around the world during the 1970s and early 1980s. In this riveting, comprehensive study, Grant, who teaches sociology at Ball State University in Indiana, explores how the Dalkon Shield and other contraceptives were irresponsibly promoted by profit-seeking physicians, drug companies and population control groups. She finds that independent, educated women were among the victims, taken in as they attempted to wrest control of their procreative destiny from men. They endured their progressive torment, entranced by the words ``safe and effective'' and assured by their doctors that the pain would go away. Reviewing the thought of such prominent feminist thinkers as Barbara Ehrenreich and Andrea Dworkin, Grant calls for the displacement of coitus as the sine qua non of sexual experience to reduce the chronic need for medical contraception. (Aug.)