This special issue adopts a comparative approach to the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century France and Britain. The articles investigate the flow of information, practices and tools across national boundaries and between groups of experts, activists and laypeople. Empirically grounded in medical, news media and feminist sources, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, they reveal the practical similarities that existed between countries with officially different political regimes as well as local differences within the two countries. Taken as a whole, the special issue shows that the border between France and Britain was more porous than is typically apparent from nationally-focused studies: ideas, people and devices travelled in both directions; communication strategies were always able to evade the rule of law; contraceptive practices were surprisingly similar in both countries; and religion loomed large in debates on both sides of the channel.

Though resulting from a long-term process, the need to manage pregnancies both medically and bureaucratically became a state concern, especially from the 1920s onwards. A woman’s official obligation to notify the state of her pregnancy (and therefore to know it on time) goes beyond a matter of biopolicies and poses a range of contradictions. ‘Pregnant or not?’ – as an issue of knowledge – is a powerful tool for apprehending the tensions between individual freedom, privacy, institutional requirements and professional powers.

In order to better understand the historical meaning of pregnancy diagnostics in mid-twentieth-century France, this paper combines three dimensions: uncertainty and its management; the informational asymmetry between institutional agents and women; and the diachronic dimension of gestation. Writing this history sheds more light on an apparent paradox: while knowing and notifying one’s own pregnancy became a duty, the tools that could help women eliminate some doubt right from the first months of their pregnancy – in particular the innovation of laboratory diagnosis – was seen as a danger. When, in 1938, private laboratories began publishing advertisements for the laboratory test in the most widely-read newspapers, tending to reframe it as a commercial service, the anti-abortion crusade was increasing its propaganda and its political pressure. This crusade’s legal victory proved incomplete, but for a long time some of the most conservative physicians recommended great parsimony in prescribing testing. Combined with reducing the legal time limit for notification, this conflict shows how the state injunctions towards women could look like a ‘double bind’.

This paper explores the influence of English female doctors on the creation of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the production and circulation of contraceptive knowledge in England and, to a lesser extent in France, between 1930 and 1970. By drawing on the writings of female doctors and proceedings of international conferences as well as the archives of the British Medical Women’s Federation (MWF) and Family Planning Association (FPA), on the one hand, and Mouvement Français pour le Planning Familial (MFPF), on the other, this paper explores the agency of English female doctors at the national and transnational level. I recover their pioneering work and argue that they were pivotal in legitimising family planning within medical circles. I then turn to their influence on French doctors after World War II. Not only were English medical women active and experienced agents in the family planning movement in England; they also represented a conduit of information and training crucial for French doctors. Transfer of knowledge across the channel was thus a decisive tool for implementing family planning services in France.

In 1920 in France, a law was passed prohibiting abortion, the sale of contraceptives and ‘anti-conception propaganda’. While contraception was legalised in 1967 and abortion in 1975, ‘anti-natalist propaganda’ remained forbidden. This article takes seriously the aim of the French state to prevent the circulation of information for demographic reasons. Drawing from government archives, social movement archives and media coverage, the article focuses on the way the propaganda ban contributed to shaping the public debate on contraception as well as lastingly impacting the ability of the state to communicate on the subject. It first shows how birth control activists challenged the legal interdiction against communicating about contraception (1956–67) without questioning the natalist obligation. It then shows how, after 1968, communication on contraception became a power struggle carried out by various actors (sexologists and feminist and leftist activists) and how the dissemination of information about contraception was thought of as a way to challenge moral and social values. Finally, the article describes the change of state communication policies in the mid-1970s, leading to the first national campaign on contraception launched in 1981, which defined information as a task that women should take on.

The birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’, has come to signify the moment at which technologically assisted human reproduction became a re ality. This was a highly mediated and visible reality, as this article explores through the example of a British television documentary about Louise Brown broadcast when she was just six weeks old, ‘To Mrs Brown… A Daughter’ (Thames Television, 1978). In the article, I discuss the programme alongside data from an interview with its producer, Peter Williams. Williams sought to convince the public that IVF was morally acceptable and to cultivate sympathy for the infertile through this film. I will consider how he went about this by focusing on the programme’s visual presentation of Louise Brown, Peter Williams’ aims in making the film and his sympathetic relationship with the ‘pioneers’ of IVF, gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and physiologist Robert Edwards. I will conclude with a discussion of the political implications of this film and how it contributed to the normalisation of IVF at a pivotal moment in its history.

Prenatal diagnosis (PND) was introduced in France in the 1970s on the initiative of medical researchers and clinicians. For many years the regulation of practices was self-imposed, decentralised and idiosyncratic. The advent of ‘therapeutic modernity’ in the 1990s gave rise to an ethical, legal and scientific framework designed to homogenise PND at a national level, with the creation of multidisciplinary centres (CPDPN) and the Agence de la biomédecine. This article first recovers the history of PND in France. It then compares the activities of two CPDPNs, using ethnographic fieldwork and by analysing national quantitative data compiled by the Agence. It argues that the official policy of nationally homogeneous practices is not born out in practice, at the local level. This lack of homogeneity is most apparent in the number of authorisations for pregnancy termination due to foetal malformation, which varies considerably from one centre to another. Rooted in local culture, this variation relates to organisational methods, decision-making processes and variable levels of tolerance towards the risk of disability. Foetal medicine practitioners, thus, maintain a certain amount of autonomy that is collective rather than individual and that is reflected in the particular ‘identity’ of a given centre.