The birth control pill was wholeheartedly embraced by women back in the 60s and today it is taken for granted. Until the introduction of the pill, women either had to accept that they were going to bear children after sexual intercourse whether they wanted them or not, or they had to rely on methods of preventing pregnancy that weren’t, in fact, always reliable. These might include more “natural” methods like trying to gauge when the woman wasn’t ovulating or having the man pull out before ejaculating, or manufactured methods involving condoms for men and diaphragms for women.

Enter women’s activist Margaret Sanger and Gregory Pincus. She was looking for a means of effective contraception, so women could control when they got pregnant, and he was doing hormone research at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. Pincus’s hormonal contraceptive research was partly funded by Sanger’s wealthy friend and suffragist, Katharine Dexter McCormick. Finally, despite initial resistance by the G.D. Searle & Company, their chemist Frank B. Colton produced a birth control pill, eventually called Enovid, which Pincus and Harvard clinical professor of gynecology, John Rock, used in clinical studies with women.

While Searle introduced the pill in 1957, it wasn’t until 1960 that the FDA approved it explicitly as a birth control pill. But its use caught on very quickly, and many women began taking it. Over the first few years, considerable adjustment had to be made to the composition of the pill, though, especially the dosage of progesterone. Some potential side effects of the pill proved deadly, because they included blood clots and strokes, along with milder things like weight gain. But these diminished as the dosages were lowered to a fraction of what they had been.

Even after the birth control pill was introduced, its progress still wasn’t all smooth sailing. Many people felt that if women started taking the pill, it would encourage sexual promiscuity, and they appeared to be right, since the popularity of this medication coincided with the increased sexual freedom of women that developed in the 1960s. But the principle of women’s right to control both their own sexuality and when they had children won out, and the last battle, to allow unmarried women to have access to the pill, was won in 1972. Since then, women’s right to control their own fertility has still occasionally been disputed, but so far has never been reversed.

By: Mike Selvon

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