America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (11 page)

As students protested school policies at universities across the country, debates raged about whether or not the pill should be available at campus health centers. A majority of 20,000 re- spondents to a 1967
Good Housekeeping
poll disapproved of distributing birth control to unmarried women, citing moral objections.
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Campus officials faced competing pressures from public opinion and student demands. At Brown University, the president came to the defense of a beleaguered health official who had prescribed the pill for two unmarried students over the age of twenty-one. A student journalist argued that college policies should be “geared to safety and efficiency and not to the ordering of the personal lives of its students, or to the leg- islating of chastity.” Regardless of the rules and public opposi- tion, it appeared that college women who wanted the pill could get it. The head of student health at the University of Chicago said many women got the pill from family doctors at home and brought their birth control to college. “Or they borrow from each other or use the prescription of a married sister or they put on an engagement ring and get them as part of preparation for marriage. It’s not a very formidable task to obtain the pills.”

A West Coast doctor agreed: “There is certainly a lot of Pill swapping, like sugar and eggs.” One doctor asked a student if she had considered the fact that she “might someday want to marry a man who holds virginity in high regard.” Her reply shocked the doctor: “Yes, but I’m not at all sure I want to marry a man like that.”
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In spite of all the controversy and commotion, by 1967 only 45 percent of the nation’s college health services prescribed the pill for students.
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At KU, the university provided prescriptions only for married women over eighteen and refused them to sin- gle women of any age. In 1966, a forum about the policy in the student newspaper generated a flood of letters, all written by male students. Most of the letters focused on student responsi- bility and called for access to the pill. “Who should make the moral decision, the university or the students themselves?” wrote one of them. But none of these men asked if
women
stu- dents should be the ones to make the decision. Finally, in 1967, a letter appeared from a female student: “I take the Pill because I’d rather express my love than repress it. I’m not promiscuous, but once in awhile I meet a ‘special’ guy. I’ve seen too many girls on campus totally disregard school for several weeks as they suffer anxiety over a missed menstrual period. . . . If a girl takes one chance a year, that’s enough to warrant taking the pill.” More noteworthy than this student’s comment was the fact that her letter was unsigned. Although all the men signed their let- ters, as required by the paper’s policy, the editors published the woman’s letter anonymously. They all agreed that to reveal the name of the one female student who wrote about her sexual ex- periences and attitudes would damage her reputation.
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The sexual revolution did not become meaningful for women until the feminist movement pushed open doors of op- portunity that made self-determination possible. Officials who made the pill available to single women in Lawrence, Kansas, had no interest in promoting sexual freedom or women’s liber- ation. Rather, they were motivated by concerns about the pop- ulation crisis and the need to prevent unwed pregnancy.
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It wasn’t until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the women’s movement gained momentum, that women began to claim the right to sexual and reproductive self-determination. Until then, the pill was just one more contraceptive—not a tool for revo- lution or emancipation.

Even popular culture reflected the pill’s limited
impact. Hollywood pumped out dozens of movies that ex- plored the sexual revolution and the counterculture of the 1960s, but the pill was absent from the screen until 1967. Cu- riously, only five films specifically included reference to the pill; four were American and one was British. All four of the American films portray the pill as causing problems rather than resolving them. The pill does not provide the characters with the means to achieve sexual liberation. The film version of Philip Roth’s
Goodbye Columbus
is a case in point. The drama surrounding the diaphragm remained in the movie version, but by the time the film came out in 1969, the pill was available, and in new dialogue, Brenda firmly rejects it. In the film, Neil assumes that Brenda is on the pill. As they shower together after a night of lovemaking, Neil casually asks Brenda if she takes the pill every morning. When she responds that she

doesn’t take the pill, he is shocked. Furious, he warns that she could get pregnant. She replies that the pills make her sick and she doesn’t like the side effects. They quarrel but she insists she will not take the pill. Finally she agrees to get a diaphragm.

Other films contained similarly negative messages about the pill. In
The Girl, the Body, and the Pill
(1967) a young woman steals her mother’s pills and replaces them with saccharine. The melodrama unfolds when the mother gets pregnant and almost dies from an abortion, prompting the dishonest daughter to rush to her side and beg her forgiveness.
Pickup on 101
(1972) features a free-spirited college student who starts taking the pill. She breaks up with her boyfriend, quits school, and joins a commune. In the end she sees the folly of her ways.
Cactus in the Snow
(1972) follows an eighteen-year-old soldier about to leave for Vietnam and eager to lose his virginity before he goes off to war. The young woman who offers to have sex with him goes into the bathroom to take a birth control pill (erroneously suggesting that the pill can be taken effectively just before in- tercourse). In the end, the two young virgins decide not to have sex after all, and the young man goes off to Vietnam, where he dies. These were hardly films about sexual liberation.

The one film that featured the pill in a lighthearted way was a British farce,
Prudence and the Pill
(1968). Set among the British upper crust, the film stars Deborah Kerr and David Niven as an unhappily married couple living in separate bed- rooms. They have not slept together in years, and each is hav- ing an affair and looking for a way out of the marriage. At the same time, their unmarried niece is sleeping with her boyfriend and stealing pills from her mother, replacing them with aspirin.

The idea spreads and soon everyone is replacing aspirin for pills, including the house servant and her lover. In a set of bizarre plot twists, the pill actually serves to reaffirm family values. The films ends with the main characters happily di- vorced and married to their respective lovers. The camera lingers on the cherubic offspring of the now married couples, whose capers with the pill lead not to sexual revolution but to babies and domestic bliss.
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As these films suggest, the pill’s liberating potential was not actualized by the sexual revolution. Only when women them- selves took control of the pill, not only by consuming it but also by making demands on their sexual partners, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and lawmakers, would the pill begin to fulfill its potential to change women’s lives for the better. Meanwhile, many women believed that there would be no real sexual revolution, and no true equality, until men shared fully in the responsibility for contraception. For that to happen, there would need to be a pill for men.

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A Pill for Men?

Seeing over the years how many different forms of ‘the Pill’ are put onto the market every year, it does make me wonder why the hell there’s no pill for men yet! . . . Can it really be
that
hard to come up with a pill that can make men shoot blanks?

age 27, 2008
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O

f the many hopes that greeted the possibility of hor- monal contraceptives, none was more elusive than the promise of a pill for men. While the arrival of the oral con- traceptive for women made headlines around the world, sci- entists were quietly working on a similar pill for men. But the male pill never made it to market. In fact, since World War II, thirteen new contraceptives for women became available— including various oral contraceptive compounds, IUDs, in- jectables, and patches—but not one new male method. By the mid-1990s, only a fraction of the funding for contraceptive

research was dedicated to male methods.
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Yet, for more than half a century, researchers proclaimed that a pill for men was just around the corner.

In 1969,
Good Housekeeping
enthused, “The notion of a birth control pill for men strikes some people as a kind of science-fiction idea. Actually, development of a male pill is easily possible in the near future—probably within the decade, according to some experts.” Describing the many research projects under way to develop a new contraceptive for men, the article concluded that “remarkable progress is being made.”
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In 1976, three scientists predicted that with adequate support, a male pill would be on the market in fifteen years. When that did not happen, the prediction was postponed another twenty years. But the optimism that a male pill would become avail- able “soon” never disappeared and, in fact, still prevails.
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Although researchers often questioned whether men would be receptive to a contraceptive pill, surveys indicated that men were willing to share the responsibility for birth control.
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In 1973, 70 percent of men surveyed in three states and the Dis- trict of Columbia said they would use a male contraceptive other than condoms or withdrawal. The methods favored by most of the respondents was a pill or injection; 19 percent fa- vored a reversible vasectomy; 84 percent believed that both partners have a responsibility for birth control; and 77 percent said they would help, “financially and morally,” in the event of a pregnancy if contraceptives used by either partner failed.
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But as a practical matter, a male contraceptive would need to have
acceptable
side effects—and most of the methods being devel- oped did not.

From the outset, the problem of side effects plagued the de- velopment of a pill for men. As was the case with the female pill, research on a male hormonal contraceptive began in the 1950s and grew out of efforts to treat infertility. Gregory Pincus, while working on the female pill, conducted a small-scale study testing the effects of Enovid on eight male patients in a mental hospi- tal. This ethically reprehensible research, though standard at the time, demonstrated that Enovid had a “sterilizing effect” on men, suggesting that it might provide the basis for a male con- traceptive. But the subject pool, besides being very small, was made up of psychotic men, which made it difficult to collect semen. They all suffered serious side effects, such as shrunken testicles. A similar clinical trial took place in 1958 among twenty “healthy adult males” who were prisoners at Oregon State Peni- tentiary. The study tested two testosterone preparations and one progesterone compound (Enovid). The compounds reduced sperm production to zero. But all the subjects lost sexual desire and had difficulty getting erections and producing seminal fluid. In 1963 another study tested a male contraceptive on thirty-nine inmates at the same prison. The compound halted sperm production without affecting libido. But when a man who took the pill was released from prison and went out drink- ing, he became violently ill and had to be hospitalized. Al- though it was possible for men taking the pill to refrain from alcohol in order to avoid serious health risks, the potentially dangerous combination of alcohol and hormones put an end to

this birth control alternative.

Additional small-scale tests continued through the 1970s in the United States and Europe. Male prisoners were commonly

used in these trials—a standard practice that continued well into the 1980s. All of these studies showed promising results, but problematic side effects remained.
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Moreover, the advan- tages of using institutionalized men who could be frequently monitored were diminished by the fact that these subjects were not having sex with women. The controlled experiments, therefore, did not demonstrate how a particular compound might work in a typical heterosexual relationship.

The problem of overpopulation motivated and legitimized research for a male pill, as it had for the female pill. As one sci- entist warned, “Because of the immensity and seriousness of human population growth every avenue should continue to be explored and we should be unwise to neglect the male ap- proach.”
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In the developing world, especially in overcrowded China and India, governments pushed for an effective male con- traceptive. In the 1960s, Premier Chou En-Lai of China and India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi called for new technolo- gies. In 1961, Gandhi tried to pass a law for large-scale forced sterilization on men. The proposal generated such protest it re- sulted in the fall of her cabinet. Gandhi then turned to promot- ing new methods of birth control: “Family planning programs are awaiting a big breakthrough; without a safe, preferably oral drug which women and men can take, no amount of govern- ment commitment and political determination will avail.”
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China did not wait for such a breakthrough. Starting in 1972, China began clinical trials of Gossypol, a male contraceptive, on 14,000 men. China was able to recruit these men because of the one-child law, which made contraception mandatory. News of the study finally reached the West in 1979 when a group of

American researchers visited China. Gossypol seemed promis- ing until toxic side effects began to appear, including diarrhea, circulatory problems, heart failure, and permanent sterility.
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Funding for the Gossypol study and other research on male contraceptives came from the World Health Organization (WHO). A 1978 article in the WHO bulletin explained, “In the past, emphasis has been placed on the development and use of contraceptive methods for women but, with increasing public- ity on the problems associated with the use of oral estrogen- gestagen contraceptives, the role of the male in contraceptive practice is re-examined . . . and research into new methods is being stimulated.” On the need for this shift in emphasis, WHO officials and Western feminists agreed.
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