From Physiology to Feminism

Abstract

Natural Fertility Control (NFC) has existed on the margins of mainstream contraceptive practice for three decades. In the wake of recent developments in New Reproductive Technology, NFC is being reconfigured and reassessed. It is now poised to enter mainstream contraceptive markets. As configured up until the late 1980s, NFC highlighted `new facts' about the fertile female body. These `facts' in turn provided `natural resources' for the reconfiguration of conventional gender stereotypes in and outside the realm of biology. Post-1980s medicalized technologies of ovulation prediction provide a means of popularizing NFC, but also lend themselves to the erasure of these `natural resources' and with them, lay-diagnostic skills. Through these erasures, new NFC techniques are active in the reappointment of `traditional' fertile female body imagery, both within the biological sciences and within gender and sexual relations.