The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (44 page)

Early in 1961, Pincus, along with his wife and researchers from the Worcester Foundation, returned to Puerto Rico to check on the continuing field trials. Pincus remained concerned about side effects, and he was eager to prove that his pill would work safely and effectively at lower doses, ensuring its long-term success.

Goody and Lizzie stayed at the Dorado Beach Hotel, in a ground-floor room with an ocean view, while most of the other scientists were housed at a less expensive hotel nearby.

One night before dinner
, Goody and Lizzie invited everyone to their room for pre-dinner cocktails. The scene had the feeling of a victory party. The patio door was open and a cool ocean breeze blew in. Everyone was smoking and drinking and laughing. It had been less than a year since the FDA’s approval of the pill, but already it was clear that these men and women had done something special, something perhaps bigger than they would ever do again, something that had fundamentally changed not only reproductive medicine but the lives of people everywhere. For one brief moment, while the party whirled on, Goody stepped out of the room. He strolled across the lanai and onto the grass that led to the beach, stopping for a moment to bend over and
pluck a pink flower
.

With his wife and colleagues watching from inside the hotel room, Pincus slid the flower behind his right ear and
began to dance
in the breeze to a song in his own head. Perhaps it was a song of his own making, the invention of a mind that had already given birth to something like a song, something that would set men and women free for generations to make love in cars on cold winter afternoons; in rowboats under moonlit skies; in corner offices late at night; in penthouses and dormitories; in houses, huts, and hotel rooms—in all the places where men wooed women or women wooed men, a spark was struck, and inhibition surrendered to desire. For generations to come there would be those who would hate Pincus, Sanger, McCormick, and Rock for what they had done, but just as surely there would be others in their debt, not only for the pleasure and passion the pill had supplied but also for the love, the opportunities, and the freedom it gave them.

Epilogue

W
E NOW ACCEPT
the pill as a part of life.

But looking back from a distance of more than half a century, it seems unbelievable that a group of brave, rebellious misfits—Sanger, Pincus, McCormick, and Rock—made such a radical breakthrough, and did it with no government funds and comparatively little corporate money. Indeed, there are countless ways that they might have failed. If Pincus had not been dismissed by Harvard and desperate to rebuild his reputation and career; if Sanger had not survived repeated heart attacks and maintained her ferocity even as she married into wealth; if Katharine McCormick’s husband had not died and bequeathed her an immense fortune; if clinical trials had dragged on long enough for Americans to become aware of the thalidomide tragedy, the pill—described by Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as the most important development in history
since the exile of Adam and Eve
and referred to by the writer Mary Eberstadt as the “
central fact
” of our time—might never have been born.

In 1963, John Rock published
The Time Has Come
, a book he and his publisher described as “a challenge to
solve the recurrent religious dispute
over birth control.” As a growing number of Catholic women ignored the pope and embraced the pill, Rock believed the Church might come around and give its approval. Debate raged everywhere, from local parishes in the United States to the highest levels of the Vatican, from cocktail parties to network news. Rock became the most prominent face of the reform movement, and for a time in the early 1960s it appeared that his views might carry the day.

Soon after the release of his book, top officials in the Catholic Church invited the chairman of Planned Parenthood to meet with them at the Vatican. Another summit on birth control was held on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. In 1964, Pope Paul VI asked a committee of Church officials to reassess the Vatican’s stance on contraception. Committee reports leaked to the
National Catholic Register
revealed that Rock’s arguments were gaining favor with members of the committee, and that
a majority of the committee members
would recommend that the choice on birth control be left to women. But the pope, unimpressed, stalled for time, and while he stalled, theologians poked holes in Rock’s argument. The pill was not a refinement of the rhythm method, they said. The rhythm method required abstinence during the fertile period, whereas the pill wiped out the fertile period. That made a big difference.

Finally, in 1968, Pope Paul VI issued the “Humanae Vitae” encyclical, stating clearly that all artificial methods of contraception violated the teachings of the Church. The pope labored over the final wording, no doubt aware that he risked coming across as out of touch with the thousands of Catholic women who had already made up their minds differently. He stressed the unifying characteristics of marriage, calling it the “wise institution of the Creator to realize in mankind his design of love.” As for sex, the pope wrote, it must be
“total”—a “special form
of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything . . . faithful and exclusive.” But after the warm and fuzzy stuff, he got to the heart of the matter, saying that every act of conjugation must “remain open to the transmission of life.” That meant the Church would not permit any action before or after sex intended to prevent procreation. Any conjugal act “deliberately rendered sterile,” he wrote, “is
intrinsically dishonest
.”

If sex for pleasure were permitted, Paul VI explained, moral standards would inevitably slide. Husbands would lose respect for their wives. Wives would lose respect for their husbands. Infidelity would flourish. The foundation of marriage would be weakened, perhaps catastrophically. Also, the pope said, if contraception became an accepted tool to control family size, oppressive governments might use it to coerce families to have fewer children.

The pope’s declaration provided a pivotal moment, with some saying that the Church had missed its chance to adapt to the modern ethos and others saying it had taken an important stand for moral and religious values. Rock gained a small measure of vindication as hundreds of American theologians issued a statement asserting that the pope’s decision was not an infallible teaching and Catholics were entitled to dissent.

In 1972, Rock retired from his practice, sold his house in Boston, and settled in a farmhouse in New Hampshire, where he swam in a stream behind the house, sipped martinis in front of the fireplace, and listened to John Philip Sousa marches on his record player.
G. D. Searle paid him twelve thousand dollars
a year for the rest of his life in what amounted to an unofficial pension and display of gratitude for his role in helping to bring Enovid to the world. He lived to the age of ninety-four, but not long enough to see the Church change its stance. It was one of the great disappointments in an almost charmed life.

“
It frequently occurs to me, gosh
, what a lucky guy I am,” he said in one of the last interviews before his death in 1984. “I have everything I want. I take a dose of equanimity every twenty minutes. I will not be disturbed about things.”

At least since the time of his trip to Japan in 1955, Pincus had been feeling ill. His stomach was frequently upset. In photos taken in the early 1960s he appears pale and drawn, the bags under his eyes heavier than usual. In August 1963, his personal physician ran a series of tests that showed Pincus’s spleen was so swollen it filled the entire upper-left area of his abdomen. His prostate was enlarged, his white blood cell count was high, and his platelet count was almost off the charts.
Bone marrow cancer
was the doctor’s best guess.

Pincus did not tell his colleagues about his diagnosis, but his friends and colleagues could see that he lacked his usual energy and no longer smiled as often. When rumors surfaced that he was ill, he denied them.

“
I am healthier than I have been
in many years,” he told a colleague in 1966, and he continued to work.

The pill proved to be the great adventure of his life. He would often go out of his way to say that he never could have done it without McCormick, Sanger, Rock, M. C. Chang, Edris Rice-Wray, and many others. After the pill gained FDA approval in the United States, after sales began to rocket, and after Pincus began to read the letters from women for whom Enovid amounted to an answered prayer, his interests became more than scientific—he became a believer and an evangelist.

The executive secretary of the Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote to tell him that she had recently met a woman “who told us she had ‘
kissed’ your picture
(in our local newspaper)—she is so grateful to you, for this is the first year in her eight years of marriage that she has not been pregnant.”

Some women complained about weight gain, others about the nausea. Many women experienced breast growth—to the extent that the sale of C-cup bras increased 50 percent from 1960 to 1969. The feminist
Gloria Steinem switched
from diaphragms to the pill in the early 1960s and wrote about it for
Esquire
. “For one thing,” Steinem said, “it is more aesthetic than mechanical devices and, because it works chemically to prevent ovulation, it can be taken at a time completely removed from intercourse.”

Pincus would dedicate the rest of his life to improving the pill and promoting it around the world, especially in Asia, where he traveled frequently. Perhaps his illness had something to do with it. He surely knew he would never attempt anything so ambitious again.

He made relatively little money on his invention—only his wages from Searle and the company stock he purchased. But he never complained because, since his childhood on the Jewish farmers’ colony in New Jersey, he had never been compelled by money. He had led a comfortable life and done the work he’d always wanted to do. It had been important work, work that proved the power of his mind, work that had left its mark.

In 1961, four hundred thousand women were taking Enovid for birth control. A year later, that number tripled to 1.2 million. By 1964, Searle began selling Enovid-E with a dose of hormones of only 2.5 milligrams, reducing the cost for consumers to only $2.25 a month and reducing or eliminating the side effects for many. By 1965, more than 6.5 million American women were on the pill, making it the most popular form of birth control in the country. Around this time, as the pill became a bona fide phenomenon, some newspapers and magazines started spelling it with a capital
P
.

With success came scrutiny. Parents, teachers, and others fretted that Pincus’s invention was spreading chaos as well as sexual pleasure. High school and college girls were talking about it, “and many are using it,” an article in
U.S. News & World Report
noted in 1966
.
Cities were pushing the pill on welfare recipients, the same article reported. Journalists worried that sexual restraint would soon be a thing of the past, that sex would become informal, everyday, divorced of all romance, mystery, and taboo. “Will mating become casual and random—as among animals?” the magazine asked, echoing the same fear the Catholic Church had long raised. Already, there were reports of “sex clubs in high schools,” wife swapping, and “
housewives earning money as prostitutes
—some with the knowledge and consent of their husbands.”

College students began demanding that campus health centers dispense the new contraceptive. One gynecologist said he prescribed the pill “without qualms” to eight to ten coeds a month, noting, “
I would rather be asked for the pills
than for an abortion.” In 1966, Pincus was asked by a reporter from
Candide
magazine to address accusations that in making the pill he had been “playing with the lives of women.” He reminded the journalist that he had invented the pill for women at the request of a woman. In any case, he said, neither he nor the pill had played with anyone’s life. Science was merely a tool. People used it as they wished. What’s more, he said, the change was only beginning. Soon, he predicted, another drug would be available that women could take after sex to make sure they didn’t get pregnant. He called it “The Next-Morning Pill,” and he had already begun discussing it with a young French scientist named Étienne Baulieu, who would go on to use sex hormones to develop RU-486, the so-called abortion pill, which became available in France in 1988 and in the United States twelve years later. Pincus also predicted that infertile women would soon be able to use surrogates to carry babies for them. In short, he said, advances in reproductive biology would rapidly transform the way human beings were created. But that didn’t mean scientists were playing with lives. They were merely exploring possibilities.