More than six decades after the pill was cleared for use in the United States, the oral contraceptive still sits at the center of debates about reproductive autonomy and how much control women can exercise over their lives, according to a new Associated Press installment in its “American Objects” series.
The AP story says the pill’s approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 66 years ago did not only prevent pregnancies; it also helped restructure how many families made decisions about when to have children. Suzanne Bell, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is quoted saying the pill’s introduction in the 1960s afforded U.S. women “unprecedented control over their childbearing and subsequent life trajectories,” a shift the AP links to broader changes in family life and society.
The AP also frames the pill as a technology that separated sex from procreation. It says women no longer needed a man’s cooperation to control fertility, and it points to a broader cultural and social effect as the pill’s use expanded in the years after it reached the market.
Central to the AP account is Margaret Sanger, whom the story describes as having founded the precursor to Planned Parenthood Federation of America and as spearheading the pill’s development with financial support from her friend, philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick. Sanger is quoted in the AP story saying: “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
The AP credits scientific work by Gregory Pincus and Min Chueh Chang, along with OB-GYN Dr. John Rock, as instrumental in bringing the pill forward. It describes the pill as using synthetic progesterone and estrogen hormones to prevent pregnancy, mainly by stopping ovulation, and also by thickening cervical mucus and making it hard for sperm to enter the uterus.
On effectiveness, the AP story says that when used perfectly, the pill prevents pregnancy 99% of the time. It adds that within two years of its initial distribution, more than a million American women were taking it, and it reports that researchers have linked the pill to later marriages as well as to greater educational attainment and labor force participation among women.
The AP story also connects the pill to the social changes it says unfolded in the 1960s and ’70s, including what it calls the sexual revolution. It then turns to the resistance that followed, describing backlash as both moral and legal in the 1960s, when Pope Paul VI condemned the contraceptive and many states outlawed contraceptives.
The AP account says married women were exempted from state prohibitions in 1965, but that bans for single women persisted in some states for years. It reports that concerns about contraception’s future have resurfaced more recently after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion, with some people now worrying that the right to use contraception could also be under threat.
Bell is quoted in the AP story saying that with “any device or procedure that gives women more reproductive or sexual autonomy, there are always groups that resist and push back,” and the AP says she pointed to a recent push for women to have more children. Despite that pushback, the AP story says the pill remains extremely popular and that U.S. fertility rates have reached what it calls a historic low.
The AP story concludes that the pill is still the most common form of reversible birth control in America, used by more than 8 million people, and that it continues to shape the lives of individuals and the nation.