THE PILL

New Control for Women

The development of a birth-control pill—which, taken daily, prevents the re-lease of a fertilizable egg from a woman's ovaries and thus makes it impossible for her to get pregnant—raised moral issues in the 1960s on both the personal and social levels. Throughout the decade greater numbers of women took the pill (actually there were twelve different varieties), breaking the link between sex and reproduction and giving the users unprecedented control over their own sexual behavior. Health concerns were frequently ex-pressed, and some critics argued that easy access to birth control was the same as condoning liberal sexual behavior; but, as Time magazine reported, by 1967 almost 20 percent of all American women who could conceive were using oral contraception.

Wonderful News for Sanger

The pill was the product of decades of human fertility research conducted in various places, but most of the credit goes to Massachusetts scientists Gregory "Goody" Pincus of the Worcester Foundation; M. C. Chang, Pincus's assistant; and John Rock of the Harvard Medical School. They had been working with the hormones progesterone and estrogen, which control the female menstrual cycle, in an effort to regulate the cycle and thus control pregnancy. By the mid 1950s an experimental version of the pill had been developed by the Worcester researchers working for the Searle Pharmaceutical Company; tested on women in Puerto Rico and Haiti, it proved to be nearly 100 percent effective. The success was wonderful news for Margaret Sänger, who had been an activist for women's reproductive rights for more than forty years and whose organization Planned Parenthood was a major financial supporter of the Worcester Foundation. Sanger was concerned, however, that the Catholic church would vigorously op-pose the use of the contraceptive as it had in the past, particularly if Catholic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy were to win in 1960.

The Autonomous Girl

In May 1960 the FDA approved Searle's Enovid—as the company had named its pill—for public use. After he took office in 1961 Kennedy gave cautious support to federal research into contraceptive use, trying to balance moral concerns with the importance of slowing the nation's (and possibly the world's) population growth. American women quickly took to using Enovid: from 400,000 women by the end of 1961 to nearly 1.2 million the year after that and 2.3 million by the end of 1963. Evidence was mounting that sexual attitudes were changing just as quickly, particularly among young women. As Gloria Steinern reported for Esquire magazine in 1962, the pill had contributed to the emergence of an "autonomous girl," who was less likely to accept without question the values of others. She quoted the results of a recent national study of college students, in which nearly all the respondents, male and female, offered the opinion that "sexual behavior is something you have to decide by yourself."

Sexual Anarchy

Meanwhile, Americans with a more conservative view of proper sexual behavior were expressing the fear that widespread use of the pill could lead to "sexual anarchy." In 1966 U.S. News & World Report offered high-school "sex clubs," wife swapping in the California suburbs, and housewives who worked as prostitutes on Long Island as examples of the declining morals the pill had helped make possible. The nation's clergymen were the most vocal critics of oral contraception: Catholic and Protestant leaders agreed that "there must be limitations and restrictions on the use of sex if we are to remain a civilized people." Reports, however, showed that 20 percent of practicing Catholic women and nearly 30 percent of Protestant women had used the pill. Not all or even most of these women fit the portrait of the unmarried autonomous girl. The pill had uses for married couples as well—to help them time the births of children or keep the family at an affordable size.

The Population Bomb

Controlling the size of families all over the world became a concern in the 1960s, as a swelling world population began to exceed the planet's limited natural resources. Unwanted pregnancies and in-competently performed abortions had become major health problems in many parts of the world, and the pill was replacing the intrauterine device (IUD) as a more effective contraceptive that women could administer themselves. The "population bomb"—as it is called by Paul Ehrlich in his popular 1968 book The Population Bomb—was being blamed for starvation, pollution, and the rising crime rate, among other social problems. Projecting from statistics at the time, Ehrlich warned that the populations of "overdeveloped countries" such as the United States doubled approximately every seventy years; the doubling time of underdeveloped countries, on the other hand, was much more rapid (more like twenty-five years), and they were much less able to support the growth economically. In poor rural and inner-city sections of the United States, where poverty and a high birthrate seemed to go together, the pill was frequently distributed through birth-control clinics like the mobile one operated by Planned Parenthood in Birmingham, Alabama.

An Important Advance

Most American women were not taking the pill to ease the world's overcrowding, how-ever. They took it because it allowed them to make decisions about their sex life without having to take fear of pregnancy into account. The pill contributed more than any other factor to the appearance of the sexually liberated woman, an important advance that nonetheless was played for all the titillation it was worth in movies such as Sex and the Single Girl (1967) and Prudence and the Pill(1968).

Sources:

Time, 89 (7 April 1967): 78-84;

Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968);

David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993);

"The Pill: How It Is Affecting U.S. Morals, Family Life," U.S. News & World Report, 61 (11 July 1966): 62-65;

Gloria Steinem, "The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed," Esquire, 58(September 1962): 97.

pill, the Popular term for oral contraceptives based on female reproductive hormones. They work by preventing ovulation. Two types of synthetic hormone, similar to oestrogen and progesterone, are generally used, although the former alone is effective in preventing ovulation; the latter helps to regulate the menstrual cycle. Possible side-effects include headache, hypertension, weight-gain, and a slightly increased risk of thrombosis. See contraception