Contraceptive Risk: The Fda, Depo-Provera, and the Politics of Experimental Medicine

The story of Depo-Provera joins the national struggle over the drug's FDA approval to the state legal issues raised by its contraceptive and criminal justice uses.

Depo-Provera is known as an injectable hormonal birth control method, but few are familiar with its dark and complicated history. Depo-Provera was tested on women since the mid-1960s without their informed consent until it was FDA-approved in 1992, but never FDA-approved as chemical castration for male sex offenders.

Contraceptive Risk is William Green's landmark study of Depo-Provera. Based on a fascinating combination of archival materials and interviews, the book is framed as three interconnected stories told by Judith Weisz, who chaired the FDA's Public Board of Inquiry on Depo-Provera, a scientific court; by Anne MacMurdo who brought a products liability suit against Upjohn, the drug's manufacturer, for the deleterious side effects she suffered from the drug's use; and by Roger Gauntlett, an Upjohn heir who, when he was convicted of sexual assault, refused to take a dose of his family's own medicine as a probation condition. Together these three stories of Depo-Provera's convoluted fifty year odyssey call for a paradigm shift in pharmaceutical drug development.
Contraceptive Risk is a thoroughly researched and engrossing approach to the scientific, political and institutional forces involved in health law and policy, as well as the multifaceted politics of measuring risk.

Author: William Green
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 05/02/2017
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.90w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781479836987


Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2017

About the Author
Green, William: - William Green is Professor of Government at Morehead State University in Kentucky, where he teaches constitutional law and comparative politics. His research and publications explore constitutional and civil liberties issues and the political and legal dimensions of economic development, labor relations, language rights, and pharmaceutical drug policies.