OT: Pills 50th Birthday

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April 25, 2010

Op-Ed Contributor - New York Times

Promises the Pill Could Never Keep

By ELAINE TYLER MAY

Minneapolis

AN end to poverty. A cure for divorce. The elimination of unwed pregnancy. Fifty

years ago next month, when the Food and Drug Administration announced that it

would approve the oral contraceptive, these were the highest expectations for

it. At the same time, few of its promoters in 1960 imagined how the pill, as it

quickly became known, would become a powerful tool for transforming women’s

lives.

In 1954, Rock, the doctor who was leading the research on the pill,

expressed the breathless excitement shared by many of his colleagues: An oral

contraceptive, he said, “would be the greatest aid ever discovered to the

happiness and security of individual families — indeed, to mankind” because “the

greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic

energy but sexual energy.”

At an international medical conference in Bombay a few years after F.D.A.

approval, another doctor unfurled a rolled package of birth control pills into

the packed auditorium and announced that the pill would solve India’s problems

of hunger and poverty by leveling off its population. As it turned out, the pill

had little effect on India’s or any other developing country’s population —

because most women lacked access to medical clinics that could provide them with

prescriptions and follow-up exams.

In the United States, some people claimed the pill would free married couples

from fears of unwanted pregnancy, improving their sex lives and lowering the

divorce rate. “With my wife on the pill, any moment is the right moment for

love,” one euphoric husband said in 1969. “Unpremeditated sex is marvelous!”

Not every husband, though, found the pill quite so beneficial. Dr. W.

Kistner, a doctor at Harvard who was an early advocate of the pill, wrote in

Ladies’ Home Journal: “Many wives feel sexually liberated by birth-control

pills. But some husbands feel enslaved. It’s as if their sense of maleness and

self-esteem has been threatened.” Kistner warned that “if the wives assumed the

dominant role in the sex act or became the least bit animalistic,” husbands

might become impotent.

Whether men found the pill a boon for or a deterrent to their sex lives, the

annual divorce rate more than doubled in the 1960s and ’70s from 9 of every

1,000 married women to 23.

Others predicted that the pill would prevent pregnancy among “naughty little

girls,” Rock’s description of sexually active single women. But the pill did not

prevent unwed pregnancy, which in 1980 increased to 18 percent of all births,

from 5 percent in 1960. Until 1972, several states barred the prescribing of

contraceptives to unmarried women, and even where it was legal, many women were

afraid to ask their doctors for the pill. In any case, as late as 1972,

three-fourths of sexually active young, single women rarely or never used any

form of birth control, a national study showed.

Just as the optimists were wrong about the pill’s effect on population, marriage

and unwed pregnancy, so were pessimists who feared that the pill would unleash

some kind of sexual chaos. A 1966 article in U.S. News and World Report asked,

“What is the pill doing to the moral patterns of the nation?” and “Is the pill

regarded as a license for promiscuity? Can its availability to all women of

childbearing age lead to sexual anarchy?”

The answers turned out to be negative. The “sexual revolution” began largely

among college students in the 1950s, before the pill was available, and did not

reach the mainstream until the late 1960s. In 1968, Science News reported that

despite the “flood tide of publicity over oral contraception and its moral

impact,” the pill had little effect on the sexual behavior of unmarried men and

women. One doctor at the time explained it this way: “The presence of the pill

does not make people decide to have sex. It is after they decide to have sex

that they go get the pill.”

In spite of all the missed predictions, there were at least two people who

understood the pill’s revolutionary potential from the beginning: Margaret

Sanger, who had first imagined a contraceptive pill in 1912, and Katharine

McCormick, a wealthy feminist — both elderly women who had been advocates for

women’s rights since the early 20th century, and who teamed up in the 1950s to

bring the pill project to fruition. Sanger and McCormick financed the research

and found the scientists to conduct it.

Sanger and McCormick anticipated how the pill would be a tool for women’s

emancipation. And, indeed, the minute the F.D.A. announced it would be approved,

millions of women rushed to their doctors for prescriptions. They would use the

pill to gain control of not only their fertility, but also their lives. They

could decide whether to have children, and when. They could take advantage of

new opportunities for education, work and participation in public life that

opened up in the years following the pill’s approval.

Today, women no longer need to choose between having a family and a career. At

the pill’s 50th anniversary, that alone is well worth celebrating.

Elaine Tyler May, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, is the

author, most recently, of the forthcoming “America and the Pill.”