Posted on 05/07/2010 8:24:18 AM PDT by LouAvul
A world without "the pill" is unimaginable to many young women who now use it to treat acne, skip periods, improve mood and, of course, prevent pregnancy. They might be surprised to learn that U.S. officials announcing approval of the world's first oral contraceptive were uncomfortable. "... Our own ideas of morality had nothing to do with the case," said John Harvey of the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.
The pill was safe, in other words. Don't blame us if you think it's wicked.
Sunday, Mother's Day, is the 50th anniversary of that provocative announcement that introduced to the world what is now widely acknowledged as one of the most important inventions of the last century.
The world has changed, but it's debatable what part the birth control pill played. Some experts think it gets too much credit or blame for the sexual revolution. After all, sex outside of marriage wasn't new in 1960.
The pill definitely changed sex though, giving women more control over their fertility than they'd ever had before and permanently putting doctors - who previously didn't see contraceptives as part of their job - in the birth control picture.
But some things haven't changed. Now as then, a male birth control pill is still on the drawing board.
"There's a joke in this field that a male pill is always five to seven years away from the market, and that's what people have been saying since 1960," said Andrea Tone, a history professor at Montreal's McGill University and author of "Devices and Desires: A History of Contraception in America."
The pill is America's favorite form of reversible birth control. (Sterilization is the leader overall.) Nearly a third of women who want to prevent unwanted pregnancies use it. "In 2008, Americans spent more than $3.5 billion on birth control pills," Tone said, "and we've gone from the one pill to 40 different brands."
There are Yaz, Yasmin, Seasonale, Seasonique and Lybrel - all with slightly different packaging, formulations and selling points. Lybrel is the first pill designed to eliminate menstrual periods entirely, although gynecologists say any generic can do the same thing if you skip the placebo and take the active pill every day.
In the 1960s, anthropologist Ashley Montagu thought the birth control pill was as important as the discovery of fire. Turns out it wasn't the answer to overpopulation, war and poverty, as some of its early advocates had hoped. Nor did it universally save marriages.
"Married couples could have happier sex with more freedom and less fear. The divorce rate might go down and there would be no more unwanted pregnancies," said Elaine Tyler May, 62, a University of Minnesota history professor who wrote "America and the Pill.
"None of those things happened, not the optimistic hopes or the pessimistic fears of sexual anarchy," she said.
And it didn't eliminate all unwanted pregnancies either. Nearly half of all pregnancies to U.S. women are unintended and nearly half of those end in abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which has gathered data on abortions for years.
The pill is often associated with the women's movement of the 1970s. But the two feminists behind the pill, the ones who provided the intellectual spark and the financial backing, were born a century earlier, in the 1870s.
As suffragists worked for the vote, renowned birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger distributed pamphlets with contraceptive advice and dreamed of a magic pill to prevent pregnancy.
Her grandson, Alex Sanger, 62, now chair of the International Planned Parenthood Council, remembers playing catch as a boy with his famous grandmother and eating her firehouse-spicy food.
"My grandmother had the idea for the pill back in 1912 when she was working on the lower East Side of New York," Alex Sanger said. "She saw women resorting to back alley, illegal abortions. One too many of these women died in her arms and she said 'Enough.'
Katharine McCormick, a philanthropist with a science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bankrolled the work of Gregory Pincus, the man Sanger convinced to develop the pill. "It was my grandmother's idea and Katharine McCormick's money," Alex Sanger said.
Ironically, when health hazards of the early pill arose - high levels of hormones caused blood clots in some women - young feminists protested that men had invented it and turned women into unwitting guinea pigs.
The FDA's response to the hazards of the pill led to greater access to safety information for patients, another less-appreciated part of the pill's legacy.
Today's pill, with much lower doses of hormones, is much safer than the pill of 50 years ago. And it may even be good for you.
"The health benefits are tremendous," said Dr. Melissa Gilliam, chief of family planning contraceptive research at the University of Chicago Medical Center. "It decreases the risk of ovarian cancer and uterine cancer. If we called it 'the cancer-preventing pill,' it would have far better traction. It's a real success story."
The pill divided mothers and daughters in its early days. Married women had clamored for it as soon as it went on the market - within two years of its approval, more than a million women were taking it. But that didn't mean they wanted their unmarried daughters to have it.
Ironically, when health hazards of the early pill arose - high levels of hormones caused blood clots in some women - young feminists protested that men had invented it and turned women into unwitting guinea pigs.
The FDA's response to the hazards of the pill led to greater access to safety information for patients, another less-appreciated part of the pill's legacy.
Today's pill, with much lower doses of hormones, is much safer than the pill of 50 years ago. And it may even be good for you.
"The health benefits are tremendous," said Dr. Melissa Gilliam, chief of family planning contraceptive research at the University of Chicago Medical Center. "It decreases the risk of ovarian cancer and uterine cancer. If we called it 'the cancer-preventing pill,' it would have far better traction. It's a real success story."
The pill divided mothers and daughters in its early days. Married women had clamored for it as soon as it went on the market - within two years of its approval, more than a million women were taking it. But that didn't mean they wanted their unmarried daughters to have it.
"I talk to my daughter about the pill a lot more than I talked to my mother about the pill," said Jean Elson, 61, a sociologist and expert on women's health at the University of New Hampshire. Elson secretly started taking the pill in college in the late 1960s before she was married. Her mother wouldn't have approved.
"The only conversations about sex I remember with my mother were 'not to.' I remember warnings about tongue kissing. She didn't do that until she was engaged," Elson said.
Many parents now discuss birth control with their unmarried daughters and sons. They also may discuss condoms to prevent disease, including AIDS. The greatest fear associated with unprotected sex for young people is no longer pregnancy, it's serious sexually transmitted disease.
Another change is advertising. Women now in their 20s have seen ads for the pill nearly their entire lives. The first magazine ads for the pill ran in 1992. Now TV ads show smiling women liberated by the ability to limit or even eliminate their menstrual periods.
"The message is your period shouldn't get in the way. It's an appealing message," said Sarah Forbes, 28, curator of the Museum of Sex in New York. Her generation takes the pill for many reasons and they take it for granted.
"We're so used to it being so freely available," Forbes said. "It's almost impossible to think of a world where we didn't have access to it."
The pill is so ubiquitous that young women may have trouble learning about other options. Tone said one doctor said he didn't remember how to fit a diaphragm, a flexible shield that covers the cervix. The pill is so highly marketed that other methods, like implants and IUDs, aren't clearly understood by young women.
"We've got choices, but the information about them isn't always well balanced," said Judy Norsigian, 62, executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves, the nonprofit organization that publishes the long-standing women's health guide of the same name.
Female doctors use IUDs twice as frequently as the general population of women and many recommend it to their patients.
"The future of birth control is not pills at all," said Dr. Lisa Perriera, 34, of Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland.
"The best birth control is easy to use, highly effective at preventing pregnancy and has few side effects," Perriera said. "The methods that fit those criteria best are IUDs and implants. I think that's where birth control is going."
Others hold out hope for a breakthrough in male-centered birth control. An oral drug called miglustat worked in mice, but not in men. Researchers are recruiting men for studies of a hormonal gel to suppress sperm production.
"The question is will a single company decide to take this to market, to get FDA clearance, a very expensive undertaking, when it's hard to predict how commercially viable a male pill would be," Tone said. As much as women would like men to be equal partners in preventing pregnancy, "women at the same time feel a little bit nervous entrusting men to take a pill or be on a patch."
After all these years, a male equivalent to the birth control pill is still five to seven years away.
Happy unMother’s Day.
Whew!
They forgot to include “treating disease and disorders” of the female reproductive tract. (Ovarian cysts, regulate irregular periods, etc.)
Our new Moslem overlords thank you for your race-suicide.
It never ceases to amaze me that the only folk who favor abortion have already been born.
Ironic, ain’t it?
I was encouraged to go on the pill at 16 when I was diagnosed with PCOS. What I didn’t know was that the pill just covered up the problems, not fix them. When I tried to get pregnant I had many problems and eventually turned to homeopathic and natural practices to get my body back in working order. I tried going back on the pill after I had Roman, but it made me feel like crap so I stopped taking it. I am so glad I am not on it anymore. I really don’t think it is a wonderful invention for me.
And the pill may change the world tomorrow but meanwhile today
Here in Topeka the flies are a buzzin’
The dog is a barkin’ and the floor needs a scrubbin’
One needs a spankin’ and one needs a huggin’
Lord one’s on the way
Oh gee I hope it ain’t twins again
A real classic from Loretta.
Problem is, the people who should be taking the pill, aren’t.
“America’s favorite birth control method turns 50”
The advent of declining American values.
I wonder if all this fawning adulation for the pill is impressing the mother of the 17 year old girl who developed blood clots directly caused by the pill (severely elevating the risk based on Factor 5 Leiden / Protein S deficiency), and subsequently died when the clots went to her lungs?
My doctor was the one who prescribed the pill that time. It has obviously haunted her since then. The girl would have been a woman of about 30 now and I can guess what her opinion would be. “Thanks for nothing.”
Bulls**t. Helen Thomas is at least 80 if she’s a day.
Nuns? Chastity is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but put it in the ring with a healthy libido and you find out it has a glass jaw.
In fairness, Factor 5 Leiden is probably more to blame than the pill in that case. Prothombrin disorders are deadly, with or without the pill.
All drugs have risks. I almost had a heart attack finding out I was allergic to benedryl. That’s not a figure of speech, my allergic reaction to benedryl is a panic attack, thudding heart, shortness of breath, pouring sweat, very scary. Almost died on amoxocylin when I was a kid, rash in my throat. If you’re part of the small minority that has reactions very bad things can happen, and unfortunately you almost never find out until you’ve taken it. It’s sad when it kills, but life has sad times.
Abortifacient can be found no where in the article. Oops.
Here is the pertinent scripture from Matthew 25:
31 And when the Son of man shall come in his majesty, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit upon the seat of his majesty. 32 And all nations shall be gathered together before him, and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats: 33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. 34 Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in:
36 Naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me. 37 Then shall the just answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, and fed thee; thirsty, and gave thee drink? 38 And when did we see thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and covered thee? 39 Or when did we see thee sick or in prison, and came to thee? 40 And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.
41 Then he shall say to them also that shall be on his left hand: Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry, and you gave me not to eat: I was thirsty, and you gave me not to drink. 43 I was a stranger, and you took me not in: naked, and you covered me not: sick and in prison, and you did not visit me. 44 Then they also shall answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to thee? 45 Then he shall answer them, saying: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me.
46 And these shall go into everlasting punishment: but the just, into life everlasting.
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