Posted by someone who remembers coat hangers.
The Pill changed everything
By splitting sex from reproduction
and unleashing potential female energy,
the Pill's power radiates far beyond the bedroom
MARGARET WENTE
When I was in Grade 12, nearly every girl I knew was still a virgin. In other ways, we were no different from 18-year-old girls today; all of us were desperate to try out sex. But birth control for teenage girls was still relatively rare, and unwanted pregnancies were a catastrophe.
Have sex, and your life could be ruined before it started. We were horny, but we weren't stupid. We knew where our interests lay.
To my mind, the most revolutionary new technology of our times was not the automobile, the airplane, the microchip, the television or the atom bomb. It was the Pill. Without it, women's liberation never could have happened. The Pill decoupled biology from destiny. In the span of just a generation - my own reproductive lifetime -- the Pill has utterly transformed our lives and reshaped society.
The Globe's excellent series this week on the Pill reminded me how ubiquitous it is, and how much we take it for granted. By one estimate, 80 per cent of North American women born since 1945 have been on the Pill at some time or other.
For a teenager, going on the Pill is just another rite of passage, like going to the prom or applying to go to university.
When I was in Grade 12, selling any type of birth control in Canada was still a crime. A loophole in the law made an exception for "the public good," which was undefined. Contraception was supposed to be for married women only, so that they could space their children. Young, unmarried women weren't supposed to have it, because it might encourage promiscuity. The Pill had only been around for six or seven years, and to get it, you had to pretend you had "menstrual disorders." Millions of unmarried women suddenly came down with awful symptoms.
As I dreamed of heading off to university (I would live in a chaperoned women's dorm where sex was theoretically forbidden), I imagined that everybody there must be having sex. It was, after all, 1967, and rumours of the sexual revolution had even reached Toronto. I didn't want my future friends at university to think I was a hick from Don Mills. But I was far too mortified to ask our family doctor for the Pill.
I was even too embarrassed to go to the Hassle Free Clinic (somebody might see me). So I got out the Yellow Pages, chose a doctor's name at random, bought a cheap gold ring at Kresge's, and told him I was engaged. I was shaking. I thought he might bawl me out, or demand to phone my mother.
Instead he wrote me a prescription, which I gratefully took off with me to university. (I discovered that rumours of the sexual revolution had been greatly exaggerated, but that's another story.)
The Pill meant far more than sex without fear. It meant choice, and not just reproductive choice. It meant that I didn't face the wretched choices of my two great-aunts (who chose independent lives, at the cost of being celibate old maids) or my own mother (marriage or med school). It meant that I could be self-sufficient and live my life on more or less equal terms with men. The precipitous decline of marriage (and the rise of divorce) is a direct consequence of the Pill.
Everybody knows about the inventors of the car, the airplane and the atom bomb. Curiously, hardly anyone knows about the inventors of the Pill. It was midwived by two crusading women and a lone-wolf scientist named Gregory Pincus. One of the women was the birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger, whose own mother was pregnant 18 times and dead by the age of 41. The other was Katharine Dexter McCormick, a scientifically minded person who was among the first female graduates of MIT and also very rich.
It was she who funded Dr. Pincus's research, because no pharmaceutical company would touch it. And it was Dr. Pincus who figured out that the hormone progesterone would suppress ovulation. (Look for the whole story in the superb documentary The Pill, which was made for the PBS series The American Experience.)
Back in the 1950s, most women went to college to get an "MRS" degree. They got married at 18 or 19 (as my own mom did) and started having babies right away (three of us by age 26). The Catholic Church was immensely powerful. Priests told women that if they practised birth control they would be haunted forever by the faces of their unborn children.
Instead, doctors gave them vaginal hysterectomies after their third or fourth child. It worked -- if they didn't bleed to death.
The Catholic Church was eager to keep the birth rate high and the Catholic population up, especially in Quebec. Elsewhere in Canada, there were fears that if the birth rate fell, immigrants would take over the country and the general IQ would fall. People also feared (rightly, as it turned out) that birth control would lead to widespread immorality.
That was only 50 years ago.
Eventually a small drug company, G. D. Searle, agreed to bring the Pill to market - with 10 times the hormone levels that it has today. It was approved for use in the United States in 1960, and society changed virtually overnight. The birth rate in Quebec plunged from six or 10 or 17 kids to one or two.
Women became lawyers because law firms no longer had to worry they'd get pregnant in the middle of a case. They became doctors because they could make sure pregnancies wouldn't interfere with their training. There were no reasons to exclude women from the workplace any more. Just as people had feared, we had sex with whoever we wanted. And we no longer needed an MRS degree.
The Pill decoupled sex and marriage, and it also decoupled marriage and procreation. The purpose of marriage became mutual satisfaction, not children. And once that happened, gay marriage probably became inevitable.
I can still recall how I shook from nerves and shame that day in the doctor's office. I had no idea I was making history. For better and for worse, the West today enjoys a level of personal freedom and autonomy unparalleled in human history - all because women can control their reproductive cycles. The Pill was such a little thing. But the bang it made was bigger than the atom bomb.
globeandmail.ca
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