This paper examines a 1998 patent for a “Positive fertility testing and reproductive health system,” which consists of what is essentially a handheld microscope for women and men to examine small samples of their bodily fluids to determine fertility. This patent describes a reproductive technology that encourages the user to engage in making observations, collecting data, and interpreting data about their bodies to make decisions about reproduction. This patent draws on the rhetoric of the women’s health movement of the 1970s to frame this technology, and the personal scientific practice that it encourages, as liberatory.
Contraceptive technologies, particularly those that rely on monitoring or calculating methods, embody an essential tension between the standardizing impulse of modern medicine and, personal knowledge women have used to control their own fertility. As with prior contraceptive technologies, the rhetoric of the patent adopts Western imperialist anxieties over global population control and relies on perceptions of “natural” methodologies of contraception as inherently moral to sell this modern medical technology to world governments.
This paper uses this patent as a case study in the complex history of contraceptives as it relates to the medicalization of women’s bodies. The positive fertility testing patent is one example of the ways that contraceptive technologies are much more than simply liberatory medical innovations. These technologies are designed to operate on multiple scales that encompass both medical imperialism through the export of tools for Western scientific vision and social movements for women’s liberation through the production of knowledge about their bodies.
