Out now: Broadcasting Birth Control
Mass Media and Family Planning
Manon Parry explores the use of mass media, from the era of silent film to the internet, to promote family planning at home in the United States, and in the expanding international arena of population control.
Fertility control
Mass media was critical to the birth control movement’s attempts to build support and later to publicize the idea of fertility control and the availability of contraceptive services. Though these public efforts in advertising and education were undertaken initially by leading advocates, including Margaret Sanger, increasingly a growing class of public communications experts took on the role, mimicking the efforts of commercial advertisers to promote health and contraception in short plays, cartoons, films, and soap operas. In this way, they made a private subject—fertility control—appropriate for public discussion. Today, mass media remains a primary battleground in the culture war over women’s reproductive health.
Author
Manon Parry, PhD, is an exhibition curator and historian of medicine, and
Assistant
Professor of Public History at the UvA.
Read her blog.