ABSTRACT
In 1955 Katherine McCormick, the chief financier of the early development of the oral contraceptive pill, complained bitterly about the difficulties the investigators were experiencing in recruiting the right type of women to participate in trials. The real problem, as she put it, was how to get a “‘cage’ of ovulating females to experiment with”.1 What is most striking is McCormick’s suggestion that women could be reduced to their reproductive physiology, i.e. that they could be seen merely as “ovulating females”. Indeed, the notion that women could be reduced to their reproductive physiology was the very foundation on which the early trials of the pill were built. Reproductive physiology itself was also conceived merely as an interplay between various hormonal molecules which could be manipulated within the body by introducing new chemical hormones (Oudshoorn, 1994). In this sense, the pill was part and parcel of the molecularization of reproduction.
