Sexual Synthetics

This chapter represents my long-standing interest in and participation in what can very simplistically be called “a women’s health movement.” ¹ A few years ago, when working on the most recent version of the birth control chapter for Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century (Bell and Wise 1998), I learned about a partnership between women’s health advocates and reproductive scientists. ² In the chapter, I devoted a long footnote to describing the partnership. In subsequent work, I have turned the footnote into a more sustained examination of the partnership because it signals an important transformation in women’s health politics, and suggests directions for the twenty-first century. The collaboration was between women health advocates and the Population Council from 1994 to 1997 to produce vaginal microbicides to prevent transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Women’s health advocates from around the world, Women’s Health Advocates on Microbicides (WHAM), worked in the collaboration to promote their goals in the broadest sense of improving women’s health and empowering women politically. Scientists from a nongovernment agency, the Population Council (PC), worked in the collaboration as part of the Council’s shift towards combining contraception and disease prevention technologies. The Population Council is well known for its development of Norplant and the Copper-T IUD, technologies criticized by women’s health advocates for embodying demographic goals of limiting the size of certain groups (especially poor and minority populations) rather than reproductive rights goals of helping individual women control fertility and improve their lives. I explore the sources of this collaboration and its consequences for scientific practice and women’s health activism, and suggest what we might learn from it and use in promoting collaborations like it in the future.