140 Years of Birth Control Coverage in the Prestige Press

This monograph by Ana Garner and Angela Michel reveals dominant themes in media coverage of contraception from 1873 to 2013. Ambitious in scope, the study provides a valuable and often fascinating bird’s eye view of this still-relevant topic. By examining the latent meaning in 3,604 newspaper stories, editorials, and letters to the editor, Garner and Michel create a picture—in broad brushstrokes—of contraception coverage as cultural narrative. They include enough well-chosen details about specific events and individuals to inspire future researchers. Ultimately, however, the biggest contribution of Garner and Michel’s work is to identify trends over time, although they do not analyze them in depth or detail. The study focuses on coverage in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, newspapers that belong to the so-called “prestige press.” One problem with this approach is that it runs the risk of treating a narrow slice of the media pie as synonymous with “media coverage.” In fact, such studies give us at best a partial view of reality, one that reflects the structural biases of the prestige press: Male-dominated, elite, and privileging those in power. Garner and Michel acknowledge that many voices have been systematically omitted from “newspapers of record”: Women, minorities, working class, poor, immigrants, and so forth. Despite this recognition of bias and omission, they sometimes treat the results of their study as generalizable to a larger, more diverse, and inclusive population. Although it’s essential to identify the constraints and perils of elite newspaper coverage of any given topic, it’s even more imperative with a topic like contraception, which is entwined with the politics of race, class, and gender. Perhaps the greatest peril lies in adopting a narrow frame of reference that is widely viewed as authoritative. Consequently, one runs the risk of reproducing the dominant rhetoric, along with existing power relations and blind spots. Nevertheless, one can still ask how an overview of 140 years of birth control coverage in the prestige press helps us understand cultural narratives about contraception. What’s the takeaway, and how can it inform future research into birth control coverage in the media? This response will focus on (a) contraception as a cultural battleground, (b) the voices of women in contraception coverage, and (c) the relationship of birth control to eugenics and sterilization.