Unsettling the (presumed) settled: Contents and Discontents of Contraception in Aotearoa New Zealand

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 20^th 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.