#quinacrine

« Ces hommes n'ont pas pris leur Atabrine » (nom commercial de la Quinacrine alors utilisée en médicament préventif de la malaria par l'armée américaine) explique ce panneau des services médicaux de l'US Army - Guerre du Pacifique - Nouvelle-Guinée - 1940's

The use of quinacrine, initially by two unscrupulous American doctors [Stephen Mumford and Elton Kessel], and then in a more widespread way as a contraceptive, created a furor in the [Indian] women’s movement. This poster by INSAF, Mumbai uses the cartoon form to campaign against quinacrine. 

Scanned from Poster Women (2006).

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Ethics of Care and Health Policy Change: Indian women's movement mobilizes against quinacrine sterilization:

Early in 1997 the Indian women’s movement filed a public interest lawsuit asking the Government to account for the growing use of an unauthorized drug by private practitioners in the country. The plaintiffs were the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), represented by its secretary Brinda Karat, Dr Mohan Rao, chair of the department of Social Medicine and Community Health at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and other faculty members. In West Bengal alone, more than 10,000 quinacrine sterilizations (QS) have been performed. In Karnataka, according to The Lancet, a project to sterilize 25,000 was underway a few years ago. 

Professor Shree Mullay of McGill University, who visited QS sites in Bangladesh and West Bengal, reported that sterilized women were not being followed up and monitored for side effects (Shree Mullay, 1997). She also observed that there were no procedures for informed consent. Women’s groups demonstrated outside the New Delhi offices of the Drug Controller of India and Dr P. K. Jain, the current president of IFFH. In Calcutta, Professor Malini Bhattacharya, former Member of Parliament, led a protest outside the clinic of Dr Biral Mullick, engaging in dramatic action to capture media attention. The offices of the CHIP Trust, to which Dr P. Kini’s practice was affiliated, became the target for demonstrations organized by women’s groups in Bangalore.

[...] Globalization processes, such as privatization and trade deregulation, facilitated [Mumford and Kessel’s] supplying drugs to collaborating gynecologists in several countries in Asia, who agreed to use the drug regardless of its unapproved status. QS was banned in India, after the Indian women’s movement sought legal intervention from the highest judiciary. The actions initiated by women’s groups and women’s health activists, in support of other women – mostly disadvantaged – exposed to an unauthorized drug, exemplify the feminist ethic of care.

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Four years before the 1998 ban of quinacrine by the Indian government, Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana wrote the brilliant “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender” in the Social Scientist which examined the great faults in the Indian women’s movement along caste, religion, and class lines. What’s important to remember about quinacrine besides the fact that it was untested and unsafe is that it was aimed at poor, marginalized women in India as part of the insidious and terrifying global politics of population control! I think Tharu and Niranjana explain this in an Indian context so well, though they focus on the hormonal implant Norplant and the pressure put on “developing nations” to adopt it under the guise of “reproductive choice” for their citizens:

The introduction into national 'family welfare' or population control programmes of long-acting hormonal implants and injectibles and possibly also of RU 486, the abortifacient pill, is another metonym through which we would like to explore contradictions implicit in feminist demands for freedom, choice, and self-determination. Women's groups and health activists in India have opposed these contraceptives principally on three grounds: first, the number of side-effects (mainly disturbed menstruation, hypertension and risk of embolism, but also nervousness, vomiting, dizziness, weight gain, acne, excessive facial hair growth or hair loss) and contraindications (women with any history of liver problems, heart problems, diabetes, clotting defects, cancer, migraine, recent abortion, irregular cycles or smoking cannot use the contraceptives); second, that such technologies require (and assume) well-equipped health care systems if they are to be administered safely and existing public health facilities are nowhere near adequate to screen potential users, insert and remove implants and provide continued monitoring of user health; third, these drugs were not developed for women in India and should not be used before conducting epidemiological and biochemical studies that take into account differences in weight, diet and so on. Considered as contraceptives for Indian women who are not part of the urban middle class, and often even for them, the profile of Norplant or Net-Oen is abysmal.

[...] The pro-woman, indeed feminist, credentials of those who research into and promote these contraceptives are further consolidated when their initiatives are seen as enabling and empowering women in conservative or religion-bound contexts. Thus the campaign for the abortifacient pill stressed women's control as well as the privacy and the promise of technologically bypassing social or legal prohibition: 'What could be more private than taking a pill, how could a state control swallowing?'. In the US the Feminist Majority spoke of anti-abortionists as the common enemy of women and science, since 'both women's health and freedom of research are being sacrificed by allowing anti-abortion extremists to block the production and distribution of RU 486.'

Proponents of Norplant and Net-Oen in India argue that long-acting implants or injectibles that do not interrupt intercourse and do not require women to do anything on a regular basis are particularly suitable for an illiterate and backward population. They also point out that these drugs expand the options open to women, and allow Indian women to take decisions about contraception that do not require the co-operation of their husbands or the sanction of their families. Choice and privacy are both invoked in the battle which is set up as one between the good, progressive, pro-woman scientists and promoters of these contraceptives, and their conservative, anti-woman opponents. Thus the 'limited options' offered by our population programme are attributed “to the conservative Indian medical mindset, which has reservations about hormonal contraceptives,” (Times of India, 1 November, 1992) while the stalling of Net-Oen and Norplant, first by feminist litigation and later by the drug controller who has called for further trials, is decried respectively as “unfortunate and politicised” (The Independent, 22 October, 1992), the handiwork of a few “vociferous and clearly misguided” groups (The Week, 16 November, 1992) and as inefficiency and “procrastination that hinders real progress” (Times of India, 1 November, 1992). The figure of the woman who is being liberated/endowed with rights in these discourses requires careful scrutiny.