Controlling Women's Bodies

The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s article “Our Bodies, Ourselves” examines the relationship between women and the knowledge of their bodies, and discusses the implications such knowledge has on the liberation of women and the control they can exercise over their “biological destinies”. From professional sources, academic literature, and the personal shared experiences of women, the knowledge collected enabled the collective to critically assess the institutions that are supposed to meet our health needs, and conferred the ability to have a choice in the matter of pregnancy. The article asserts that throughout many centuries, ignorance about women’s bodies has had one major consequence: pregnancy, a consequence that has produced profound implications on the freedom women have over their life and body. The consequence of pregnancy restricted women’s expression of sexuality and behavior, relegated their societal roles to maternal and domestic responsibilities, and subjugated their status as secondary. Having a child was not a choice, but an expectation imposed on women. However, the advent of birth control methods and contraception, and awareness about them, freed women from the traditional lifetime of pregnancy and gave them control over their reproductive desires and body. This knowledge on women’s reproductive systems, birth control methods and abortion, and the laws governing these methods of contraception provided the realization that women could truly set out control over whether and when they could have babies. Other bodily processes such as menstruation have also imposed significant implications on what it is to be female and how to control the female body.

 What I found particularly interesting and relevant to this discussion is the notion of women “controlling their body.” Asserting that birth control, abortion, and other contraceptive methods that have been created to control and regulate natural bodily processes is a form of legitimate control over their bodies implicitly asserts that the female body is unnatural. One passage that effectively brings this to light is the passage explaining the purpose and reason the women’s movement fights to secure this freedom of choice; “That is why people in the women’s movement have been so active in fighting against the inhuman legal restrictions, the imperfections of available contraceptives, and poor sex education that keeps many women from having this crucial control over their bodies.” (298) Implicit in this statement is the assumption that women who do not have access to birth control and contraception methods cannot control their body in a natural manner. The only way for women to control their bodies is essentially through man-made technologies and medicinal practices that provide contraception or abortion, and this paradigm in a sense recognizes the female body as unnatural. This notion also suggests that women were unable to control their bodies for thousands of years before the advent of birth control and other contraceptive measures to regulate and control women’s biological functions, which is another assumption that I find troublesome.