The Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig (Macmillan, £20)
Margaret Sanger was the 20th century’s greatest campaigner for birth control. When contraception was still illegal in the US, the American spent her life searching for a “magic pill” she could offer the desperate women who wrote to her for help, many of whom had 10 or more children. She wanted a cheap, easy and effective method of contraception that would free women from constant child-bearing, allow them to control their fertility with or without the permission of their partners and enable sexual liberation. Could something so extraordinary be achieved?
Jonathan Eig tells the fascinating story of the covert research programme undertaken by the unorthodox scientist Gregory Goodwin Pincus, assisted by the liberal Catholic doctor John Rock, that eventually led to the pill’s development through the use of innovative synthetic hormones developed by scientists Frank Colton and Carl Djerassi. The research was commissioned by Sanger and funded by Katharine McCormick, a wealthy woman who had once smuggled diaphragms into the US stitched into the linings of her dresses.
It is not a story, sadly, in which women are treated particularly well. Anti-birth control laws made it difficult to test the new drug: women in the US and Puerto Rico, including medical students and psychiatric patients, were tricked or coerced into trialling it, and it was eventually released on to the market in 1957 without being adequately tested.
Still, almost 60 years later, as some women begin to turn away from the pill, the book is a reminder of just how much it has changed the lives of men and women alike.
Margaret Sanger was the 20th century’s greatest campaigner for birth control. When contraception was still illegal in the US, the American spent her life searching for a “magic pill” she could offer the desperate women who wrote to her for help, many of whom had 10 or more children. She wanted a cheap, easy and effective method of contraception that would free women from constant child-bearing, allow them to control their fertility with or without the permission of their partners and enable sexual liberation. Could something so extraordinary be achieved?
Jonathan Eig tells the fascinating story of the covert research programme undertaken by the unorthodox scientist Gregory Goodwin Pincus, assisted by the liberal Catholic doctor John Rock, that eventually led to the pill’s development through the use of innovative synthetic hormones developed by scientists Frank Colton and Carl Djerassi. The research was commissioned by Sanger and funded by Katharine McCormick, a wealthy woman who had once smuggled diaphragms into the US stitched into the linings of her dresses.
It is not a story, sadly, in which women are treated particularly well. Anti-birth control laws made it difficult to test the new drug: women in the US and Puerto Rico, including medical students and psychiatric patients, were tricked or coerced into trialling it, and it was eventually released on to the market in 1957 without being adequately tested.
Still, almost 60 years later, as some women begin to turn away from the pill, the book is a reminder of just how much it has changed the lives of men and women alike.
