Contrôle de la population et santé reproductive dans le Canada des années 1970

Poor Body Politics: Population Control and Reproductive Health in 1970s Canada

Lecture by Erika Dyck

Wednesday, March 18 2020

4:30

3647 Peel Street

Din Bates Seminar Room 101

This presentation is based on a book that I am writing with Maureen Lux, called Challenging Choices. It is an historical examination of how reproductive politics in 1970s Canada were shaped by competing discourses on global population control, poverty, personal autonomy, race, and gender. We suggest that during this period Canadians joined an international conversation about population control and revisited older ideas about eugenics, heredity and degeneration. Birth control had always been part of these conversations, but by the 1960s its relationship to ideas of progress, elitism, and feminism changed. New medical technologies introduced during this period, namely the birth control pill, alongside new expectations for healthcare access after the introduction of medicare, altered the playing field for discussions about medical interventions in reproductive health. The projections about global food shortages not only put the spotlight on birth control as a viable response, but also directed attention to Canada, as a major food producing nation, poised to contribute to global solutions. For nearly a century birth control had been prohibited; its use was reserved for population groups who were designated as suffering due to poverty, mental illness, or both. This patronizing approach to birth control gradually changed over the course of the 20th century, but we argue that the same principles applied in 1969 as Canadian authorities discussed the merits of decriminalizing contraception. The early debates about eugenics in the 1910s and 1920s shared a common theme with the birth control discussions in the 1960s and 1970s: economics mattered more than moral, cultural, or social evaluations of the sanctity of some lives over others. Birth control was not truly a debate about choice as much as it was a debate about cost.