Home » History » African History » "Cut the strings short": IUDs and abortion in South Africa

"Cut the strings short": IUDs and abortion in South Africa

© Jessica Powers

South Africa, 1960-1975

Thousands of African women enter medical clinics, asking for something that will prevent pregnancies. Doctors fail to mention that there is a pill they can swallow every day. They silence any protest from nurses or others with a short reminder that pills require "patient responsibility."

Instead, African women are offered an intra-uterine device (IUD). "Cut the strings short," they say as doctors insert an IUD in their wombs. "I don't want him to know I'm using anything."

Nobody tells them that an IUD can be as dangerous as using a wire hanger to abort a fetus. Nobody tells them that IUDs are not contraceptives, that they are not preventing pregnancy by using one. Instead, IUDs turn the womb into an abortion clinic; each woman will probably abort several pregnancies every year.

Later, the African women return. The IUD strings have "wandered" and now poke out of their belly or rectum. Or the IUD is lost somewhere in the body. Sometimes, after aborting several pregnancies, the womb turns into "a toxic sink" and women die (Bradford, 134-136).

During the 1960's, women around the world began to pop pills daily or allowed doctors to insert intra-uterine devices (IUDs) into their wombs as forms of contraception. But doctors were leery about IUDs because they did not understand all of the health implications.

In South Africa, doctors who were uncertain about the implications for women's health refused to insert them into the wombs of white women.

Instead, thousands of black females became medical guinea pigs as doctors experimented with the new form of birth control. Sometimes, doctors inserted IUDs only six hours after a woman gave birth to a child, or after she had been shamed for enjoying sex and was vulnerable to suggestions that she should stop having children(Bradford, 135). Doctors discouraged the pill because they required "too much patient responsibility" (Bradford, 134).

Once black females had IUDs inserted in their wombs, doctors discouraged removal, "'even in the presence of considerable initial inconvenience'" (Bradford, 134).

The use of IUDs was based partly on the state population control program, which encouraged white women to procreate and discouraged black women from having children. As historian Helen Bradford reports, doctors "sterilized unwitting African women" and pushed IUDs on a population that they perceived as "non-compliant" (Bradford, 135).

All of this, despite the fact that abortion was illegal. Women did not even know that they were "powerless accomplices of abortions" (134).