Skip to main content

The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

Read More

The U.S. claims Puerto Rico as a territory; reproductive experimentation on Puerto Rican women dramatically increases.

Date: 1898

PR
EXP
RHRR
MED
EUG

Starting during the time of Spanish colonization, methods of reproductive control are used against Puerto Rican communities. When the U.S. claims the island as a territory in 1898, the practice rapidly expands. "Essentially, Puerto Rico, and its people have served as a laboratory for American contraceptive policies and products," reproductive justice organizer and writer Elena Gutiérrez (2004) writes.

Medical trials of products, such as contraceptive foam, birth control pills, and the intrauterine device, will be denied approval on the mainland. As such, they will be illegally and nonconsensually tested on Puerto Rican women as a method of social and population control.