Deceiving Puerto Rican Women: A Birth Control Experiment

February 9, 2021

Written by: Cris Noelle

Originally Published July 3rd, 2020

In recent history there are examples of serious ethical abuses in research, especially for communities of color around the world.  In the United States, we know this to be true from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Henrietta Lacks and the Havasupai Native Americans.  In my research career we discuss these abuses as well as others in the context of bioethics and what is now considered unethical treatment of research subjects in experiments.  I will share that going back about 16 years ago when I was pregnant with my second child, my husband’s grandmother sat down and told me a story (at the time she was about 80 years old) about women in her town in Puerto Rico who were unable to have children.  She proceeded to talk to me about this and how the women in her town were taken to Humacao in the 1950s and 60s to take a “medicine” that doctors wanted the women to take in pill form to see if it “worked”.

When I heard this story I thought to myself, is this real…Why did this happen to the women of my people? How could doctors tell women to do this?  Well after some digging I found some interesting information on how doctors used these women as “guinea pigs” to test the first birth control pills on them without describing what was the purpose and potential risks to their taking the medicine (Quintanilla, 2004).

Below is an image taken from a “Planning Your Family” booklet that describes Enovid, the first birth control approved in the U.S. (The Museum of Menstruation.) used by the Washington Post article, “Guinea pigs or pioneers? How Puerto Rican women were used to test the birth control pill.” (Vargas, 2017)  Now for me this story is more real then it has ever been and how the mistreatment of women, especially women of color in medical research.  Now can we understand that there is an oral history passed down by people, in this case women, to the generations that come after them.  We need to talk about these difficult histories to learn from them and how not to allow these abuses to continue in other forms.