This paper examines women’s changing contributions to reproductive science between the 1960s and the 1980s, when a series of medical disasters and discoveries raised urgent questions about how to understand and regulate reproductive risks. The idea of “therapeutic cultures” (Daemmrich) captures relationships among the state, the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry and patient organisations that informed how drugs were regulated. This useful concept, however, excludes the critical role of dynamic global trends.
Through the 1960s, New Zealand’s legislators responded to the wave of regulations imposed on new drug access to the market in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe post-thalidomide. Parliamentarians and health leaders alike worried that New Zealand’s good healthcare system and well-educated English-speaking doctors would attract global pharmaceutical companies looking for human “subjects” to test experimental, potentially unsafe treatments. The community of influential reproductive scientists played an ambivalent role. They helped construct and implement the new regulatory framework, yet also exploited its weaknesses to conduct research that would not have been possible elsewhere.
We examine archival records of women’s participation in reproductive research: from case reports of experimental treatments to a double-blind randomised control trial, via product research sponsored by a pharmaceutical company; from foetal medicine to long-term contraception; studying interactions of pharmaceutical drugs, synthetic hormones, foetal health, and women’s bodies. Amid these transformations, we ask what changed—and what stayed the same—for research participants.

Dr Charlotte Greenhalgh

Our changing understanding of the "the patient“, especially in the context of reproduction and reproductive health, seems to posit a direct connection between private affairs and the public sphere. But what are the nature and mechanisms of this linkage? And how is it mediated?
Today, patients are no longer merely the object of medical endeavors. Patient engagement has become a crucial component of medical knowledge production and health governance, rooted in previously existing forms of critical social engagement and competing with established gold standards of knowing, such as scientific causation (Epstein 2008). The growing empowerment of this group of actors into powerful stakeholders is evident. Yet simply expanding the concept of the patient to cover their role as users and consumers in the liberal market economy also falls short: it fails to account for the particularly personal mix of stymied agency and high vulnerability that is characteristic of campaigners and activists on medical issues.
In this talk, we will discuss the role of oral history and patient experience in a historical reconstruction of drug disasters, as well as a potential framework to examine the origins, development, and consequences of patient engagement with antenatal drug use, iatrogenic disability, and reproductive health from the 1960s onwards. Secondly, we will consider the interaction of personal testimony and the public sphere though a reassessment of the contribution of documentary film and reportage to the Duogynon campaign, a transnational group which formed around people who self-identify as having experienced teratogenic risks of hormone pregnancy tests.