The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (4 page)

“I knew birth control existed, but I didn’t know anything about it,” one woman told Harvey for her oral history. “To go out and actually get it [birth control] would mean that I planned to do these things, to have sex. Since I knew it was wrong, I kept thinking I wasn’t doing it, or I wasn’t going to do it again. Each time was the last time.
Birth control would have been cold-blooded
.”

“
I was terribly frightened about getting pregnant
,” another woman admitted, “but I never did anything about getting birth control. I’m not really sure why. Maybe I kept telling myself we weren’t going to do it again.”

Soon, of course, the young brides as well as the brazen few who engaged in premarital sex did get pregnant. Not just once but over and over again. As the Baby Boom began and families grew, women raising four, five, or six children began seeking more effective means of contraception. Women who married at nineteen or twenty were done—or wished to be done—with babies by the time they were thirty.
Most American women, with the exception of Catholics, accepted the idea of birth control
, and most of them wished for a more convenient and effective method.

Fear of pregnancy was an unavoidable part of sex for young women in the 1950s. A woman who was unmarried and pregnant was in terrible trouble. Single motherhood was not an option, at least not among the middle and upper classes. Abortion was illegal and underground abortions could be dangerous or difficult to obtain, especially for those without money. Many women felt trapped—by their bodies, by their career options, by their contraceptive options, by pregnancy, and perhaps most of all by their limited choices.

That’s why Margaret Sanger was so interested in meeting with Gregory Pincus. She was seventy-one years old, well past her sexual prime, and had lost some of her brazenness. Instead of fighting for sexual liberation, she employed more pragmatic arguments, touting the importance of population control and family planning.

She had long held that it was
not a question of principle
but a question of methods. If the right method of birth control were discovered, she believed, the sex—and everything else—would take care of itself.

THREE

Spontaneous Ovulations

T
HE RABBITS WERE
kept in the basement of the Worcester Foundation, along with the rest of the animals, so that their smell wouldn’t stick to everyone and everything. Using a small eyedropper, Chang began feeding the animals small amounts of liquid progesterone—between two and five thousandths of a gram.

Chang was tan and slender with thick black hair that he oiled and combed back from his brow. When he smiled, which he often did, a crooked front tooth protruded; otherwise, he was as handsome as a Hollywood leading man, if Hollywood in the 1950s had had Chinese leading men. In China, Chang had won a national competition to earn the right to study abroad. He chose the University of Edinburgh, where he majored in agricultural science and took particular interest in sheep sperm. In part because he spoke English so poorly and in part because it was his nature, Chang came to believe that the key to success was working harder than anyone around. The fact that he was smarter than almost anyone around didn’t hurt, either.

Chang spent seemingly endless hours in the laboratory, never complaining. But in truth he did not care much for the progesterone work. Every time an animal was tested it had to be killed and cut open to see if any eggs had been released. It was grisly and inefficient, but Chang refused to delegate the work to an assistant. “I like to feel the experiments through my hands,” he once said. “Would you let someone else play
tennis or chess
for you?”

The initial results, recorded in the spring and summer of 1951, were as he and Pincus had expected. The animals receiving progesterone did not appear to ovulate.

“
Victory
!” shouted Chang.

Next, Chang tried inserting the hormone in the rabbits’ vaginas. That worked, too, although not as well. Larger doses were required, and the progesterone stopped doing its job after about five hours. After the vaginal tests, Chang tried pellets lodged under the rabbits’ skin. This time, a single pellet prevented ovulation for months.

Pincus was pleased, but he wasn’t finished. Rabbits are not like humans; female rabbits have to copulate to release eggs. So Pincus told Chang to move on to rats, which, like humans, ovulate spontaneously. Rats offered another benefit for research purposes: they’re sexually prolific. When a female rat is receptive, she can mate as many as five hundred times with various males in a span of six hours.

Chang caged male and female rats together, two males to every five or six females, and injected some of the females with progesterone. Once again, the experiment worked; there were no pregnant rats. And once again, larger doses had longer lasting effects.

Pincus and Chang ran tests through the night and into the early morning in their first weeks and months experimenting with progesterone, hoping that a solid report to Planned Parenthood
might get them more money
. Sometimes church groups or Rotary Club members would visit the Foundation to see what kind of work went on. The Foundation was funded in large part by its neighbors, after all, and so Pincus made it a point to welcome tours.

Visitors might find Goody Pincus weighing a female rat’s uterus, castrating male rats, or seated behind his desk smoking Viceroys and looking over the budget. He seldom smiled and almost never laughed, but he had an easygoing way that put people at ease. If his visitors ventured into the basement they would see dozens of rabbits and rats, although they probably wouldn’t see them having sex because the animals were shy around humans. Pincus enjoyed explaining science to the uninformed. Moreover, he deemed it part of his job. Margaret Sanger wanted a pill, but Pincus was not embarking on this project simply to satisfy a client. He took himself too seriously as a scientist to do straight work for hire. “The modern-day investigator,” he once wrote, “cannot be satisfied with the invention of a ‘
cunning device
.’” Tinkering with the reproductive process could be dangerous. A misstep at any point in the process could cause lasting and profound “physiological
consequences that are not apparent on the surface
.” The researcher, he said, must first understand as much of the process as possible, and then he must work to explain that process to others. He mocked as naïve the “
ivory tower conception of research
” that says a scientist should do his research, publish his results, and wash his hands of the matter. The modern world required a different, more activist brand of science, he said. It would not be enough merely to create a more effective contraceptive. If such a thing were to work, the scientist leading the research would have to make sure doctors, nurses, clinicians, and patients understood the how and why of it. He would have to be an evangelist. He would have to see that the contraceptive was properly used, just as the physicists who worked on the atomic bomb had done. They didn’t hand off their bomb and move on; they formed safety committees and promoted dialogue about the weapon’s future use. Pincus couldn’t understand why physiological researchers weren’t more engaged with
the world in which they lived
.

In the 1930s and even the 1940s, contraception was controversial and hormone research was in its primitive stages. But by the time Pincus and Chang came along, the world was changing. Many politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and social activists viewed population growth as a threat to economic development and world peace. Between 1920 and 1950, poor countries had been growing much more rapidly than prosperous ones. There was a growing sense among activists and intellectuals—a sense often informed by racism, arrogance, and politics as well as genuine concern—that high birth rates in poor countries would devastate the world. Poverty and starvation would spread; the diseased and deficient would multiply; and overpopulated nations, in desperation, might tip to communism. In 1927, a Rockefeller Foundation–funded study of contraception sought “some simple measure which will be available for the wife of the slum-dweller, the peasant, or the coolie,
though dull of mind
.” In language that was widely accepted at the time, some argued that governments should subsidize the sterilization of the feeble-minded as well as people with communicable diseases.

In 1932, the novelist Evelyn Waugh warned in his book
Black Mischief
that finding solutions to population growth would not be as simple as crusaders like Sanger hoped. The novel’s hero, an English playboy living on a tropical island, designed a poster meant to discourage couples from producing big families. The poster displayed two scenes: in one, a family with eleven children manifested signs of disease and malnutrition; in the other, a husband and wife with one child lived in affluence. Between the two pictures was the image of a contraceptive device and the legend “Which home do you choose?” The islanders in Waugh’s book chose the larger family and concluded that the device in the middle—“the Emperor’s juju”—was responsible for the unfortunate condition of the couple that had only one child.

Changing such attitudes would never be easy. Sanger supported economic development and education. At the same time, for all her tireless efforts as a champion of women, she could be shockingly insensitive, too. She agreed with the eugenicists who said that women not qualified to be mothers ought to be sterilized. But sterilization, education, and economic development were not enough. She sought a solution that would do it all—reduce population size, restrict reproduction among unfit parents, and make sex more fun, and she had come to believe that only a truly scientific contraceptive would do. A scientific solution would give her the legitimacy she needed to make a broad and lasting impact.

If Sanger had approached Pincus with the idea of developing a pill solely to allow women more pleasure in sex, it’s unlikely that he or any other male scientist would have risked his reputation on it. But now he had a chance to create a simple solution to many of the world’s most daunting problems. These were Sanger’s longtime concerns, not his, but he could see the potential. When he began, he was interested primarily in the science, but he quickly understood the social change a birth-control pill could effect. “Our globe is facing a threat that could be far
more serious than the atomic bomb
,” he told one journalist. Birth control struck him as an issue big enough to bring him the fame and respect he believed he was due.

The Worcester Foundation, with about twenty scientists, operated on an annual budget of $300,000. Residents contributed about $63,000 of that amount. Forty miles west of Boston, Worcester had a population of 208,000. It was a booming factory town in which about six hundred and fifty companies employed nearly fifty thousand men and women in the manufacture of steel, wire, machine tools, grinding wheels, coiled springs, carpets and rugs, corsets, shoes, envelopes, leather goods, woolens, skates, automobile parts, firearms, boilers, sprinkler systems, wrenches, crankshafts,
wool-spinning machines, and electric clocks
. The city had more than thirty hotels, ten theaters, two daily newspapers, and a prestigious art museum containing important works by Renoir, Monet, and Gauguin. Worcester residents were proud to live in one of the biggest manufacturing cities in the country not located on a waterway. They were also proud, thanks to Pincus and Hoagland, to have their own scientific foundation, which they supported in much the same way they supported the local Boys Club. One year, supporters of the Foundation sponsored a barbershop quartet concert at Mechanics Hall that raised five hundred dollars. Pincus and other Foundation leaders gave dozens of lectures each year to community groups and social clubs. Local businesses like the
Wear-Well Trouser Co. and the Worcester Baking Company
pitched in with donations. But as the Foundation grew and as support for scientific research expanded in the years after the war, community support was eclipsed by government grants and drug company contracts.