Why are Norplant and Depo-Provera promoted, given their serious, adverse side effects?
A. Depo-Provera and Norplant have been disproportionately promoted among women of color, indigenous women, women with disabilities, and women on federal assistance. Population control, (largely through sterilization), directed against people of color and indigenous people has an extensive history in the US and internationally. As many Third World countries began to resist the neo-colonial economic policies imposed by the World Bank and IMF, US government and business interests blamed the unrest on the Third World’s “overpopulation problem.” In 1977, R. T. Ravenholt from the US Agency for International Development (AID), announced the plan to sterilize a quarter of the world’s women because, as he put it, Population control is necessary to maintain “the normal operation of US Commercial interests around the world. Without our trying to help these countries with their economic and social development, the world would rebel against the strong US commercial presence. The state’s increased i
