CHICAGO — A world without “the pill’’ is unimaginable to many young women who now use it to treat acne, skip periods, improve mood, and, of course, prevent pregnancy. They might be surprised to learn that US officials announcing approval of the world’s first oral contraceptive were uncomfortable.
“Our own ideas of morality had nothing to do with the case,’’ said John Harvey of the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.
The pill was safe, in other words. Don’t blame us if you think it’s wicked.
Tomorrow, Mother’s Day, is the 50th anniversary of that provocative announcement that introduced to the world what is now widely acknowledged as one of the most important inventions of the last century.
The world has changed, but it’s debatable what part the birth control pill played.
Some specialists think it gets too much credit or blame for the sexual revolution. After all, sex outside marriage wasn’t new in 1960.
The pill definitely changed sex, though, giving women more control over their fertility than they had ever had before and permanently putting doctors — who previously didn’t see contraceptives as part of their job — in the birth control picture.
But some things haven’t changed. Now as then, a male birth control pill is still on the drawing board.
“There’s a joke in this field that a male pill is always five to seven years away from the market, and that’s what people have been saying since 1960,’’ said Andrea Tone, a history professor at Montreal’s McGill University and author of “Devices and Desires: A History of Contraception in America.’’
The pill is America’s favorite form of reversible birth control. (Sterilization is the leader overall.) Nearly a third of women who want to prevent unwanted pregnancies use it. “In 2008, Americans spent more than $3.5 billion on birth control pills,’’ Tone said, “and we’ve gone from the one pill to 40 different brands.’’
There are Yaz, Yasmin, Seasonale, Seasonique, and Lybrel — all with slightly different packaging, formulations, and selling points.
In the 1960s, anthropologist Ashley Montagu thought the birth control pill was as important as the discovery of fire. Turns out it wasn’t the answer to overpopulation, war, and poverty, as some of its early advocates had hoped. Nor did it universally save marriages.
“Married couples could have happier sex with more freedom and less fear. The divorce rate might go down and there would be no more unwanted pregnancies,’’ said Elaine Tyler May, 62, a University of Minnesota history professor who wrote “America and the Pill.
“None of those things happened, not the optimistic hopes or the pessimistic fears of sexual anarchy,’’ she said.
And it didn’t eliminate all unwanted pregnancies either. Nearly half of all pregnancies to US women are unintended and nearly half of those end in abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which has gathered data on abortions for years.
The pill is often associated with the women’s movement of the 1970s.
But the two feminists behind the pill, the ones who provided the intellectual spark and the financial backing, were born a century earlier, in the 1870s.
As suffragists worked for the vote, renowned birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger distributed pamphlets with contraceptive advice and dreamed of a magic pill to prevent pregnancy.
Katharine McCormick, a philanthropist with a science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bankrolled the work of Gregory Pincus, the man Sanger convinced to develop the pill. “It was my grandmother’s idea and Katharine McCormick’s money,’’ Alex Sanger said, now chairman of the International Planned Parenthood Council.
