Wood the Pill: Part 1

Wood

The Pill: Part 1"

In 1951, birth control advocate and feminist Margaret Sanger, along with a philanthropist named Katherine McCormick, proposed the conception (no pun intended) of a birth control pill. Through careful experimentation and human trials, by 1954, the experimental pill was shown to be effective. In a controlled experiment, not a single woman ovulated after taking a pill with human progesterone.

The birth control pill changed the world. It enabled men and women to have sex without worrying about pregnancy, and many people believe it spawned the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. However, the scientists working on the pill had no idea of the scale of the changes that their work would create in human society. The invention of the pill is testimony to the fact that science can have a tremendous impact on the way that human beings live. Margaret Sanger may have had some inkling, as she worked for most her life to ensure that women had access to affordable and effective birth control, but very likely none of the scientists working on the project realized the full impact of what they had found -- ironically, the wife of the Harvard Medical School fertility specialist John Rock seemed to have more awareness of what had been created and what this meant for the empowerment of women than any of the men involved in the project.

The creation of the pill seems deceptively easy. Its 'birth' was the result of a merger of politics, financial philanthropy, and the scientific efforts of academic medical research. The bigger conflicts the pill generated may have been societal, rather than scientific, in terms of ensuring proper access for women to get the pill, and educating women about how to use the pill, and not feel guilty about taking control of their reproductive health.