The Social Side Effects of the Pill: “Gendered Compulsory Birth Control” and Reproductive Injustice

In the COVID-19 era, an old social problem has reemerged under new circumstances: whose bodies should bear the risk and responsibility of sustaining our social lives? Should we attempt a return to pre-mitigation-measures ‘‘normal,’’ if it places immunocompromised people at heightened risk? Does mandating vaccines infringe on individual rights, or does it ensure others’ rights to health by dampening rates of transmission? While the COVID-19 virus is new, the questions it raises about medical technologies, health justice, collective responsibility, and individual rights are not. The anti-vaccination movement’s genderblind call to protect bodily choice against COVID-19 vaccine mandates overlooks numerous public health initiatives that have enlisted women to bear the side effects of medical technologies that mitigate biological risks to others’ health and social wellbeing. The HPV vaccine, for instance, was promoted first in the United States for girls and young women, even as men are also carriers of and susceptible to the virus (Wailoo et al. 2010). Like vaccines, prescription contraceptive technologies come with potential risks and side effects, yet women are routinely asked to weather the discomfort of their use in the service of their sexual partnerships’ reproductive autonomy. Cultural beliefs about the rights enabled and constrained by medical technologies profoundly shape how people understand their bodily autonomy and responsibility. Krystale E. Littlejohn’s Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics exposes the gendered beliefs and practices around contraceptive technologies that inform public health approaches to reproductive rights but counterproductively impede reproductive justice. Prescription contraception, once primarily seen as a technology of women’s empowerment, has, beginning with Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body (1997), been shown to be a tool both of liberation and of social control. Birth control has a coercive history, especially for women of color, trans and nonbinary people, and those with disabilities. However, since Kristin Luker’s 1975 book Taking Chances: Abortion and the Decision Not to Contracept, few works have explored how women, in their own words, rationalize contraceptive decisions, making sense of birth control’s relationship to their autonomy, agency, and responsibility to others. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision underscores the relevance of critically examining who is held accountable for unintended pregnancy and how sexual partners navigate contraceptive decision-making. While published before the 2022 Dobbs decision, Just Get on the Pill provides timely interpretative analysis of the ways contraceptive technologies, and their use, reproduce cultural scripts around gendered behavior and responsibility, leading to gender inequities. As Littlejohn compellingly argues, Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics, by Krystale E. Littlejohn. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. 184 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520307452. Review Essays 211