By changing women’s lives, the pill changed the nation

By LAURA UNGAR, AP Medical Writer

The pill helped give birth to modern America.

Known by one simple word, the revolutionary oral contraceptive — approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 66 years ago — didn’t just prevent innumerable pregnancies. It gave women new freedom, changing family life and society forever.

“Its introduction in the 1960s afforded U.S. women this unprecedented control over their childbearing and subsequent life trajectories,” says Suzanne Bell of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The pill disentangled sex from procreation. Women no longer needed a man’s cooperation to control their fertility.

The pill’s greatest champion was a woman. Margaret Sanger, who founded the precursor to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, helped spearhead its development with financial support from her friend, philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick. Sanger said, “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”

Biologists Gregory Pincus and Min Chueh Chang and OB-GYN Dr. John Rock were instrumental in the pill’s development. It uses synthetic progesterone and estrogen hormones to prevent pregnancy, mainly by stopping ovulation but also by thickening cervical mucus and making it hard for sperm to enter the uterus. When used perfectly, it prevents pregnancy 99% of the time.

Within two years of its initial distribution, more than a million American women were taking it. Monumental social change followed. Researchers have linked the pill to later marriages and greater educational attainment and labor force participation among women. It also played a part in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.

The pill spurred backlash, too. In the 1960s, Pope Paul VI condemned it and many states outlawed contraceptives. Married women were exempted from state prohibitions in 1965, but the ban for single women persisted in some states for years.

More recently, after the Supreme Court’s decision ending the constitutional right to abortion, some worry the right to use contraception is also under threat.

“With any device or procedure that gives women more reproductive or sexual autonomy, there are always groups that resist and push back,” says Bell, pointing to the recent push for women to have more children.

But on the whole, women aren’t heeding that message. U.S. fertility rates have reached a historic low, and the pill remains extremely popular. Today, it’s the most common form of reversible birth control in America, used by more than 8 million people — and still shaping the lives of individuals and the nation.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. This story is part of a recurring series, “ American Objects,” marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more stories on the anniversary, click here.