The Great Bluff That Led To A 'Magical' Pill And A Sexual Revolution

[rug]

One of the scenes in this book that I love is Katharine McCormick, who's even older than Sanger - she's 80 now - and the pill is approved. It's available. She goes into a drugstore with a prescription from her doctor and asks for it. This 80-year-old woman is going in and asking for a prescription for the birth control pill. And obviously, she wasn't planning on using it. She just wanted to be able to buy it. It just meant so much to her to know that this was available now to women. You know, 60 years too late for her in many ways, but she had done it. And that was an amazing accomplishment.

October 07, 2014 3:09 PM ET

The history of how the birth control pill was developed in the 1950s is recounted in Jonathan Eig's new book The Birth of the Pill.

In the 1950s, four people — the founder of the birth control movement, a controversial scientist, a Catholic obstetrician and a wealthy feminist — got together to create a revolutionary little pill the world had never seen before.

They were sneaky about what they were doing — skirting the law, lying to women about the tests they performed and fibbing to the public about their motivations.

"They absolutely could've been imprisoned for some of the work they were doing," journalist Jonathan Eig tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "These guys are like guerrilla warriors — they're always having to figure out ways to do this thing that will attract the least attention. ... They can never really say they're testing birth control."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/07/354103536/the-great-bluff-that-lead-to-a-magical-pill-and-a-sexual-revolution

38:42 audio at link. Worth every second. "She just wanted to be able to buy it."

[TreasonousBastard]

1. I heard that piece, and almost wrecked the car...

when I heard the brilliant marketing concept of getting approval as a menstrual aid and noting on the box "Pregnancy might be impossible while using this product."

Nobody was fooled. Not the FDA, and certainly not the women who bought the stuff in droves.

[rug]

2. I was driving over 6 hours yesterday and heard it twice.

Absolutely riveting.

I had not even heard of Gregory Pincus.