There are many pills in the world, but only one of them whose name lays claim to the category of which it is forms part. When people speak of The Pill, you know they don’t mean aspirin or Prozac but rather that mother of all blockbuster drugs, the birth control pill.
A synthetic blend of the female hormones progesterone and estrogen, oral contraceptives were approved in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, the same year that swept Kennedy’s space-aged Camelot into the White House. The pill, too, seemed mythic and new … the age-old dream of avoiding unwanted pregnancy brought to you by modern science.
The drug’s impact was immediate and immense, generating an enormous social impact. By 1962, well over one million American women were taking oral contraceptives. By 1964, the pill had become the most popular form of reversible birth control, a position it retains throughout the world.
The development story for the pill involves the serendipitous alignment of four fascinating characters: fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, herself the sixth of 11 children, who coined the term “birth control” and was imprisoned in 1916 for opening the nation’s first family planning clinic; funding source Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester; visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard Medical School in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilisation but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would initially be marketed by Searle as “Enovid”.
Enovid was actually approved by the FDA as something to promote menstrual regulation. However, on the bottle was a warning label stating that this drug had another function — it also prevented pregnancy. At a time when birth control was still illegal in many states, the feeling was that the indirect approach would be wise. It had the effect of sending the message to women that if you're really desperate to avoid pregnancy, this pill can help. Women began going to their doctors and asking for it, because they knew what it really did. Doctors knew what it really did too, so they began telling women, and that helped get the word out. It helped create this word-of-mouth, grassroots movement where the pill was becoming popular even before it was unofficially christened "the pill”.
And there’s a 2015 book by Jonathan Eig that tells the story. Spanning the years from Sanger’s Greenwich Village days in the early 20th century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, The Birth of the Pill is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Check it out HERE.
Story Idea: Remo Giuffré
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References
wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pill
pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-and-womens-liberation-movement
smithsonianmag.com/history/why-the-oral-contraceptive-is-just-known-as-the-pill
nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/141218-birth-control-pill-contraception-science-medicine-ngbooktalk
Images
1. Photo Credit: Jerry Mosey for AP
2. Enovid was originally sold as a menstrual regulator in the late 1950s before it was approved as the world's first birth control pill in 1960.
3. The Pill on the cover of TIME magazine in April 1967
4. Margaret Sanger poses in Chicago in 1917, just one year after she opened America's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York.
5. Katharine McCormick, 22 April 1913
6. Gregory Pincus
7. Book: The Birth of the Pill, How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig, 2015
