Abstract
In January 2017, New Zealand’s medicines and medical devices safety authority, Medsafe, announced in a press release that its Medicines Classification Committee (MCC) had recommended a reclassification of certain oral contraceptives in order for them to be made available over the counter in pharmacies. In A/NZ, a progressive temporal narrative has been established around contraception that begins with the heroic struggle of women at the turn of the 20th Century to get access to contraception and abortion as a way to manage their reproductive lives and progresses to the guaranteed access of contraceptives to women. My intention to interrogate the contemporary contraceptive reality is not a project to undermine the historically important moves women have made here in A/NZ; but, rather, to include new places of analysis including how indigenous communities experienced the same contraceptives moments differently under the gaze of a eugenics project.
Highlights
In January 2017, New Zealand’s medicines and medical devices safety authority, Medsafe, announced in a press release that its Medicines Classification Committee (MCC) had recommended a reclassification of certain oral contraceptives in order for them to be made available over the counter in pharmacies (Medsafe 2017b)
Once oral contraceptives are reclassified as over the counter, the pharmacy division of Green Cross will be at the forefront of providing women access to oral contraceptive without prescriptions
It does not give due consideration to the wide range of contraceptive experiences for women across different life circumstances. While this episode only hints at the range of complicated issues around contraception in Aotearoa/New Zealand (A/NZ), it was an interesting window into the complexities of contraception in the contemporary: access, use, availability, need, and desire
Summary
Contraception has a rich, complex, and contradictory history, in which collusions and collisions between diverse groups have led to their development in the North (the United States in particular) and dissemination globally (Tone 2001). Once the news of the Medsafe recommendation was released in A/NZ, the nuanced critique in popular media reflected critiques similar to Grigg-Spall’s - i.e. with women and physicians troubled by the practice of prescribing the pill for issues like acne and period regulation for young women as early as 15 (Cameron 2017b). These spaces of critical refusal of the pill have far been articulated amongst a limited number of radical and educated women. These spaces become a crucial site of analysis, because a contraceptive operates variously as oppressive, repressive, or an emancipatory technology
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