In the 1970s-80s, commercialized reproductive technologies experienced a reputational crisis. After the high-profile 1970 Nelson Senate hearings, 18-30% of U.S. women stopped receiving the Oral Contraceptive Pill (OCP). The intrauterine device (IUD), particularly the Dalkon Shield manufactured by A. H. Robins Company, was announced to the medical community and consuming public as the OCP’s ideal alternative. Displacing the OCP from the market niche of contraceptives-seeking American women, Dalkon Shield became the most popular IUD. Yet, like its predecessor, it experienced its own media crisis. In 1974, information surfaced about Dalkon Shield’s serious side effects, including uterine wall perforation, ectopic pregnancy, and death. Robins filed for bankruptcy in 1985, when the product had been removed from market and 11,000 lawsuits filed.
In this presentation, using scientific publications, deposition records, and physicians’ personal papers, I trace the strategies of two physicians: Hugh Davis, co-inventor of Dalkon Shield, who discredited the OCP and marketed his Shield as its logical successor; and Howard Tatum, inventor of the Tatum T IUD, who exposed Dalkon Shield’s harms and unseated it with his own competing product. In unearthing the interpersonal networks underlying this litigious and regulatory drama, I argue that these commercial contraceptives were not natural heirs to one another but rather constructed as such by their influential physician-inventors. I join historians’ debates about the usefulness and perils of using ecological metaphors, such as “niches,” to describe social phenomena. Market desires are not natural phenomena, but rather, malleable to human construction, capable of being molded, captured, redirected, and produced. This succession of commercial products—from OCP to Dalkon Shield to Tatum T—reveals the strategies for mutual leveraging among commercial marketing, consumer safety regulations, and medical expertise in the 1970-80s U.S.