Weekend Economists Making Choices October 24-26, 2014

[Demeter]

How the Pill Overcame Impossible Odds And Found a Place in Millions of Women's Purses By Ann Friedman BOOK REVIEW

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119569/birth-pill-jonathan-eig-reviewed-ann-friedman

Margaret Sanger promised it would be “a miracle tablet.” Hugh Hefner hailed it as “a powerful weapon.” A 30-year-old woman with six children called it “my ray of hope.” The pill is now so common—four out of five sexually active women have used it—that it’s easy to forget that oral contraception was once the stuff of fantasy.

In The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution, Jonathan Eig chronicles the decades-long effort to make that fantasy a reality. In his telling, this transformation is thanks to a unique alliance between feminists and scientists: the spotlight-seeking activist Margaret Sanger, the rebel researcher Goody Pincus, the single-minded heiress Katherine McCormick, and the photogenic family doctor John Rock. These four people provide a formula for what it takes to create scientific breakthroughs that are ahead of their time politically: an incredible amount of drive and little concern for traditional values, a willingness to flout powerful institutions and their rewards, a tremendous amount of money, and, eventually, a way to appeal to the mainstream. It’s no wonder that, despite lots of modern talk about disruption and innovation, truly world-changing breakthroughs are so rare.

America before the pill sounds like something out of Margaret Atwood. Contraception was illegal in most states from 1873 until after World War I, and not even recognized by the American Medical Association until 1937. Single women in 26 states were denied contraception until well into the 1960s. While some women were lucky enough to live in a state with more liberal birth-control laws or near a clinic that was willing to circumvent them, many were out of luck. Women used douches as a dangerous and ineffective morning-after contraceptive. Some tried the rhythm method, but even doctors’ knowledge of the reproductive system was still spotty, so that technique wasn’t very effective. Condoms were available, but married couples were reluctant to use them. Some clinics offered diaphragms, which were often poorly fitted and difficult to obtain. And these methods were only available to women with male partners who were interested in preventing pregnancy. Many men were not.

As early as 1914, Margaret Sanger, then a women’s health activist in New York, had a crazy idea: reliable birth control—ideally in pill form so women’s partners wouldn’t even have to know they were taking it. It wouldn’t just ensure that “woman” was not synonymous with “mother,” it would be the dawn of a new era of women’s pleasure and self-realization: sex without fear of pregnancy. Sanger knew that as long as men had the final say in when and how women became mothers, they would have the final say about all aspects of women’s lives.
This was a long-term goal, though. In the meantime, Sanger founded the Birth Control Federation, later called Planned Parenthood, to distribute condoms and diaphragms and lobby for the liberalization of contraception laws. She became a figurehead. She fretted that talking about “family planning” instead of “birth control” would dilute her movement, yet seemed to have few qualms about cozying up to racist, eugenicist “population control” advocates in the hopes of spreading the birth control message wider and farther. But in the post-war era, as contraception became more accepted but still remained politically taboo, Sanger grew sick of the incremental approach. She did not want to focus on improving the diaphragm. She did not want to distribute more condoms. She wanted a pill.

This was a tall order. The midcentury medical establishment was still figuring out how hormones worked—an oral contraceptive was a pipe dream. And Sanger couldn’t exactly roll up to a respected research institution and ask their most forward-thinking scientists to create one. Anti-contraception laws were still on the books in most states, and even though enforcement was lax, venerated institutions weren’t eager to push the bounds of legality. Sanger herself was a nationally known firebrand—not the type of person that tenured Ivy League medical researchers would have lunch with. Instead she sought out Pincus, “a scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation” who had been fired from Harvard and recently established his own private research institution in Worcester, Massachusetts. Pincus was “interested in science and action, not long-term budgets or endowments,” Eig writes. He loved a challenge. And so when Sanger came to him in 1950 with her crazy idea for a pregnancy-preventing pill and asked if it was possible, he said he was willing to try.

Pincus’s research was enabled by the largess of Katherine McCormick, who had earned a biology degree at MIT and later inherited a fortune when her schizophrenic husband died not long into their marriage. She, like Sanger, saw controlling fertility as essential to women’s self-determination. In 1923, when contraception was still very much illegal in the United States, she smuggled diaphragms from Europe by buying them in bulk and having them sewn inside newly purchased clothing. When the paltry research budget Sanger was able to wrangle from Planned Parenthood proved insufficient, McCormick stepped in, funneling millions of dollars (in today’s money) toward Pincus’s research...

BUT IT WASN'T ALL RAINBOWS AND UNICORNS, NOR SMOOTH SAILING. IT WAS A HARROWING ADVENTURE! READ MORE OR LISTEN TO THE PODCAST BELOW:

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

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.---Margaret Mead

Margaret Sanger


Katharine McCormick, biologist & millionaire philanthropist; FOR A SHORT BIO:

http://www.amazingwomeninhistory.com/katharine-mccormick-birth-control-history/

AUTHOR JONATHAN EIG
http://www.trbimg.com/img-543fdc4b/turbine/ctfl-jonathan-eig-web-jpg-20141016/900/900x506


MANY OF MY GREAT AUNTS TOOK TO THE CHURCH, TO AVOID BEARING 17 CHILDREN, AS THEIR MOTHER DID....WE AREN'T THAT FAR FROM THAT TIME...ONLY 3 GENERATIONS OR SO!