A history of contraception
By Sarah Cleary
Taking Precautions: the story of contraception
A touring exhibition from the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Showing at the Western Australian Museum until March 1.
For thousands of years, women around the world have been attempting to control their fertility. They have used everything from crocodile dung and honey to the synthesised hormones in the contraceptive pill, to abortion. This exhibition documents contraception from ancient times to the present.
It is an appropriate time for such an exhibition, soon after the legislative attacks on women's reproductive rights in Western Australia and the ACT. In its presentation of the many ways that women have obtained and conducted abortions through the ages, this exhibition implicitly and explicitly dismisses the notion that the number of abortions will decrease if the procedure is outlawed.
The exhibition does include material produced by both pro- and anti-choice campaigners. However, it counterposes the "Stop Abortion Now" propaganda with coat-hangers and related symbols and signs. One such sign attacks the extreme right-wing MP in NSW, Reverend Fred Nile, and his Nile Care Options, which reduce the alternatives to a coat-hanger or a six-month wait on a public hospital list.
As expected, the exhibition highlights the pro-choice campaign in Western Australia early last year. It includes material from the various groups involved, including Resistance and the Association for the Legal Right for Abortion.
However, considering the importance of that campaign for women Australia-wide, the lack of information about it in this exhibition was a little disappointing.
The exhibition also addresses, if only briefly, the issue of HIV/AIDS by presenting a history of the condom. It was with the advent of AIDS on a mass scale that condoms began to be advertised widely and the packaging changed to include and appeal to gay men.
While the exhibition concentrates on the contraception available to people in the advanced capitalist countries, it does present some information about the contraceptives available to people in the Third World. Unfortunately, it does not examine why only harmful contraceptives are available to the vast majority of women in these countries.