Clomid: The Anti-Pill and Family Planning

In ideals and some reality, the Cold War-era American family held rigid adherence to the nuclear ideal—heterosexual marriage, prescribed gender roles, and reproductive continuity. The rise of pharmaceutical hormones, most well-known in the contraceptive pill, both disrupted and upheld this model. While the contraceptive pill somewhat destabilized this model by enabling women to delay or forgo motherhood, Clomid (clomiphene citrate) performed its own form of disruption. Originally developed as a contraceptive, Clomid became one of the first widely successful fertility drugs in the 1960s. This analysis examines how Clomid’s transformation reinforced yet simultaneously troubled Cold War family norms. By positioning infertility as a treatable, biomedical condition, Clomid played a pivotal role in medicalizing reproductive challenges and shifting infertility from a private sorrow to a public health concern. In doing so, it reified the expectation that women could achieve biological motherhood, reinforcing traditional femininity while also granting women new forms of reproductive agency. This paradox—where Clomid both upheld and unsettled dominant familial ideals—exposes deeper anxieties about gender, technology, and the role of medicine in shaping intimate lives. Drawing from pharmaceutical records, medical discourse, research records, public constructions of the ideal family, and feminist critiques of reproductive medicine, this paper explores how Clomid’s success fueled a growing fertility industry and expanded the biomedical management of women’s reproductive health. By tracing its trajectory alongside broader technological and sociopolitical shifts, this study takes a history of science, medicine, and technology approach to interrogate the ways in which this pharmaceutical hormone blurred the boundaries between control and enhancement, subversion and reinforcement. Clomid’s legacy reveals that reproductive technologies did not simply support or dismantle the Cold War family—they destabilized it from within.