These "Children Won't Become Women": Depo-Provera, Intellectual Disability, and the Indian Health Service.

Abstract

Although Depo-Provera is best known as an injectable hormonal contraceptive, the drug also served as a method of menstrual suppression for institutionalized women with intellectual disabilities in the late twentieth-century United States, even after the Food and Drug Administration refused to license it for this purpose. To understand how institutionalized women came to be injected with Depo-Provera in the 1980s, this article investigates the controversy at A School for Me, a Navajo-run institution that came under fire during a 1987 congressional hearing for administering Depo-Provera to its residents. Beyond its utility as a contraceptive, many physicians and institutional administrators saw Depo-Provera as a treatment for menstrual anxiety, a reprieve for care workers, a non-surgical substitute for sterilization, and a delayer of puberty for women with intellectual disabilities. These perceived benefits explain why some physicians and administrators championed routine injections of Depo-Provera in institutional settings, despite public backlash and concerns about the drug's potential to cause cancer. Framing Depo-Provera as a form of care enabled it to be deployed as a form of control over these women's menstruation and their bodyminds. Editor's Note: This article received the American Association for the History of Medicine 2025 Shryock Medal, an award for an outstanding, unpublished essay by a single author graduate student on any topic in the history of medicine.