In January 1971 a letter from RC Bretherton was published in the Medical Journal of Australia. He was reporting consensus observations of products of pregnancy associated with hormone pregnancy tests (HPTs) from ‘practitioners experienced in therapeutic abortions’ (MJA, 2/1/1971, p.48). Bretherton and his father were both illegal abortion providers. So was William McBride who, a decade earlier, had discovered the teratogenic effects of Thalidomide. Three years after Bretherton’s letter, orthopaedic surgeon Bill Brogan published his retrospective observations of children born with cleft lip and cleft palate to mothers who had used HPTs. He commented that some of the affected pregnancies had been unwanted and the tests may have been carried out in the hope of causing miscarriage, noting ‘this is obviously a misuse of the drug’ (MJA, 11.1.1975, p. 44). For these Australian medical practitioners, unwanted pregnancy, abortion and HPTs were intertwined concerns.
This paper examines the emergence of understandings of the teratogenic risk associated with HPTs in Australia in the 1970s in the context of abortion, which became lawful in some Australian jurisdictions during the period when the alarm about HPTs was being raised. It will also consider scholarship on disability and abortion and the various ways in which information about teratology and abortion have intersected in a longer Australian history of drug regulation.

The story of contraception in Yugoslavia is an inherently global narrative. This paper maps the development, distribution, and supply of contraceptives in Yugoslavia which took place across what György Péteri called the ‘nylon curtain,’ and historian of Hungary Dora Vargha recognised as ‘gaping holes in the Iron Curtain’ through which expertise, people, and technologies travelled both within Europe and beyond. The paper focuses on the 1970s and 1980s as Yugoslav physicians and gynaecologists turned their attention to developing, marketing, and testing intra-uterine devices (IUDs) in line with international standards. Using archival sources from the post-Yugoslav states, as well as US-based and international health organisation archives, the paper emphasizes the country’s global interconnectedness across Cold War ideological and political divides. Yugoslav gynaecologists and physicians looked internationally for ideas regarding contraceptive development, participating in the growing network of global measures to control populations, assist families with planning the number and spacing of their children, and enable women to control their own fertility.

There is a well-rehearsed conversation about demographic anxieties amongst scholars examining the state’s focus and control on the reproductive lives of its citizenry. I want to ‘flip on its head’ the demographic anxiety narrative, to instead suggest a demographic desire that exists alongside this anxiety. I posit that historical anxiety, has been recast as desire in post-colonial nation states like India, to continue unabashed historical ‘population control’ project. For this paper presentation, I take us outside the lab where reproductive technologies (and histories) are made, but rather examine the visual manifestations of how reproductive histories of India travel and circulate in the everyday. In moving into the different spaces where reproductive technologies are experiences, allows me to show how reproductive control continues to shape lives of women. I look at the contemporary advertising campaigns for emergency contraception in India alongside the advertising campaigns of state promotional messages around ‘small families’ in the 1970s and 80s (pre-economic liberalization). While examining contemporary and historical material, this presentation takes a feminist Science and Technology lens to look at the science of Demography and a media studies framing to study the advertisements. The presentation, is part of a longer project, which aims to suggest an adjacency politics of placing demographic desires, alongside demographic anxiety to account for the way people are interpellated into a politics of reproductive management.