Birth control invented

Ability of parents to choose, in an effective manner, the number and timing of their children’s births

Combined with the discovery of “the pill,” medical advancements, and changes in social mores, the 1950’s witnessed growing awareness and usage of birth control and concomitant changes in policies regarding its use in the United States and Canada.

Birth control was available and used in some forms prior to the 1950’s; from ancient times, people were aware of herbs, shields, and pessaries. By the late 1830’s, a cervical cap and rubber condoms became available. By the 1950’s in the United States and Canada, rhythm and barrier methods had been available for some time. Society in general, however, was neither familiar with nor disposed to use these methods. Since the passage of the federal Comstock Law in 1873, labeling birth control information as an“obscenity” and forbidding its dissemination through interstate commerce or the U.S. mail, citizens tended to feel it was wrong and generally were lacking in education about it. Some states had laws against contraception, churches were far from countenancing birth control, and medical personnel evinced little ease in recommending it.

By the Anglican Lambeth Conference in 1930, which allowed limited use of birth control at the discretion of couples, the United States was warming to the idea of birth control for medical or therapeutic purposes. During the 1930’s, the American Medical Association recognized birth control as a legitimate aspect of medical practice. Subsequently, a combination of events elicited a change of mind in the American public: birth control advocate Margaret Sanger’s scrapes with the government, the isolation of estrogen and progesterone, the discovery of the rhythm method, the Crane decision, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and concerns about world population. Although thirty states still had laws against contraception on their books by 1950, the following decade witnessed major breakthroughs in preventing and planning pregnancies.

In fact, the 1950’s capped a century of negative attitudes toward birth control and witnessed a social upheaval, emblematic in the development of the pill, or Enovid. From the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, the growing push toward women’s rights, slowly changing attitudes toward sexuality, and medical technology eventuated in a politics of reproduction and an eventual movement of churches and government out of the bedrooms of the citizenry. In the words of President Dwight D. Eisenhower , with respect to regulating birth control, it was “not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility”; in short, it was “not our business.”

The rise of television expanded media outreach as a herald of scientific discoveries and afforded the social body greater access to political discussion. In the postwar climate, as women symbolized by “Rosie the Riveter” were sent home from the experience of doing “men’s work” during World War II, they forged a new sense of control over their lives. Slowly, discussions about sexuality began to be carried on above a whisper, aided by the relatively new discipline of psychology, which found itself attached to medicine rather than philosophy.

The Pill

By 1951, when Planned Parenthood of America—an outgrowth of Margaret Sanger’s first birth control clinic—operated two hundred birth control clinics, and the American public had become more comfortable with the thought of contraception, the use of educational pamphlets and lectures began to increase, and work on using hormones as a birth control method was under way after a small grant was given to researcher Gregory Pincus by Planned Parenthood. By mid-decade, Pincus and John Rock of Massachusetts had found a way to create an oral birth control pill. In a paper delivered at the Laurentian Conference on Endocrinology in Canada, Rock put forth his work that showed how progesterone inhibits ovulation.

Eventually, the drug company G. D. Searle’s formulation of the birth control pill, called Enovid, was submitted for the approval of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) . Given state laws against birth control, Rock and Pincus could not conduct the large-scale studies necessary for FDA approval in the United States. Rather, they arranged for the first large-scale clinical trails to be held in Puerto Rico .

By October 29, 1959, G. D. Searle had filed an application to the FDA to license Enovid, with its stated purpose being for alleviation of menstrual problems, and on May 9, 1960, the FDA approved it to be used only under a doctor’s prescription. By August 18, 1960, the first commercialized oral contraceptive was available in Skokie, Illinois.

Impact

By late 1959, more than 500,000 women in the United States were taking Enovid, presumably for its “off-label” purpose of preventing conception. After the decade’s discoveries concerning the hormonal implications of pregnancy avoidance, the development of Enovid, and the changed mindsets in the United States and Canada, the question of birth control became entirely reframed.

Bibliography

Kaledin, Eugenia. Daily Life in the United States, 1940-1959: Shifting Worlds. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

McFarlane, Deborah, and Kenneth Meier. The Politics of Fertility Control: Family Planning and Abortion Policies in the United States. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2001.

McLaren, Angus, and Arlene T. McLaren. The Bedroom and the State. Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1986.

Watkins, Elizabeth S. On the Pill: A Social History of Contraceptives, 1950-1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.