BIRTH CONTROL
Since strong anti-birth control laws in Massachusetts and in many other states made it impossible for [G. D. Searle and Company, who first produced a contraceptive pill] to conduct the large study of humans required by the FDA, it turned to Puerto Rico, which already had a long history of governmental birth control programs. The pseudocolonial island of Puerto Rico became the most important clinical site for testing the Pill outside the national disciplinary institutions of the asylum and the prison and functioned as a parallel, life-sized biopolitical pharmacological laboratory and factory during the late 1950s and early 1960s. During the cold War period, Puerto Rico would become the United States’ biggest pharmacological backyard. The island was the invisible factory behind the Playboy mansion and the white liberated middle-class American housewife.
–Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie
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