America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (14 page)

Within the United States, men involved in the studies re- ported positive results. Larry Setlow, a thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer in Seattle, volunteered for three differ- ent clinical trials of pills and injections. “I never had any real noticeable side effects. I didn’t notice any mood changes. I may have put on a little weight. . . . They all worked really well and I was able to look at my lab results and see my sperm count drop to zero.” Forty-five-year-old Quentin Brown, a married father of three who lives in Los Angeles, reported no signifi- cant problems after taking hormonal contraceptives for more than a year. His motivation for helping to develop the pill was hardly in support of feminism, however. “It is time for men to have some control. I think it would empower men and deter some women out there from their nefarious plans. Some women are out there to use men to get pregnant. This could deter women from doing this. An athlete or a singer is some- one who could be a target and they could put a stop to that.”
47
Men were not the only ones to raise the issue of trust.

Twenty-eight-year-old Mary B saw the other side of it: “I have heard women say that they’d be against a male pill be- cause they wouldn’t trust men to take it. Of course that’s silly. The point of a male pill isn’t that it allows you to stop taking it. It’s just that you have twice the protection. Also, I think that it will force men to be more responsible towards children

they did father. No longer would the ‘she tricked me’ option be on the table.”
48

While some men perceived potential benefits, others re- mained reluctant. Forty-year-old Stuart H, a single college administrator, said he would welcome a method for men but not one that involved taking hormones: “I would rather rely on a solution that doesn’t involve medicating myself, and the problems women have had with hormone therapy doesn’t make me anxious to want to sign on to taking a hormone-type therapy.”
49
Many women, however, see it as a matter of fair- ness and equality. Kelly H was “amused and pissed off” to hear that “men refused to consider a male contraceptive until there was some non-chemical breakthrough because they were afraid of what the chemicals and hormones might do to their bodies and ‘masculinity.’ I told my mother that they obviously weren’t worried about the damage to
women
’s bodies over multiple years of ingesting ‘dangerous’ chemicals and hor- mones. Sexist fuckers.”
50

In keeping with the values of her Southern Baptist up- bringing in rural Oklahoma, twenty-eight-year-old Cathy S and her husband of seven years married as virgins. But her tra- ditional ideals did not stand in the way of her belief in equality for women. “I like the idea of a male birth control pill—some- thing that would give men the freedom and responsibility of reproductive choice. It would be one more step toward egali- tarianism.”
51
Rachel A, age twenty-eight, resents “that birth control is now my sole responsibility. I’d feel better about it if [my boyfriend] had to pop a pill everyday at the same time too.” At age seventeen, Donna H was already annoyed and

frustrated: “I have to take a pill and use hormones to control fertility but men do not.” Susan G, a twenty-two-year-old stu- dent, lamented, “What kind of a culture thinks it’s okay to mess with a woman’s chemistry and fecundity, but to even consider a pill that does the same for men is completely ludicrous?”
52

In 2008, MSNBC repeated a decades-old claim: “For the first time, a safe, effective and reversible hormonal male con- traceptive appears to be within reach.”
53
Studies remain under way all across the globe. The World Health Organization, which has long supported research on male contraceptives, re- ports a great deal of success with compounds under study and no difficulty finding recruits to volunteer for the clinical trials. Optimistic scientists proclaim that a new male contraceptive is just around the corner, as they have predicted for half a century. But the same question remains: Will men take it?

No such question stood in the way of another pharmaceuti- cal product aimed at men’s sex organs: Viagra. In the midst of continuing efforts to secure funding for the development of a hormonal contraceptive that men would take, the pharmaceuti- cal industry poured massive resources into developing a pill for men that would do just the opposite. Viagra hit the U.S. market in 1998 and quickly became the most successful prescription drug ever launched in the United States, despite the fact that it carries serious health risks.
54
Apparently, a pill that enhances the potential for men to impregnate women is considerably more marketable than one that diminishes that possibility.

6

Questioning Authority

I am often asked if I had a bad experience with the pill. I never took it, nor did my daughters, but, like other women of my generation, I learned early that: gynecologists tend to interfere too much with natural processes, and, they adopt new technologies without adequate evaluation.

The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill
1

W

hen the pill arrived in 1960, it rode the crest of the wave of optimism, faith in scientific progress, and a be-

lief that professional experts could guide the world to a better future. The pill promised to fulfill the hopes of the new era. As the decade unfolded, however, dissent, distrust, and rebel- lion emerged to challenge the certainties that seemed to pre- vail in the early 1960s. After the pill’s celebrated debut and its embrace by millions of women, it also became the focus of widespread challenges to the authority of religious leaders,

doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and lawmakers. Women led the charge against the mostly male experts and officials who prohibited or limited access to the pill, controlled infor- mation about it, and dismissed women’s concerns about risks and side effects.

Initially, many American women defied religious or gov- ernmental authority simply by taking the pill. The Catholic Church banned the use of contraceptives, yet many Catholics took the pill anyway. Women also undermined the law. In 1960, thirty states still had laws restricting the advertising and sale of contraceptives. Massachusetts and Connecticut banned contraception outright. In Connecticut, contraceptive use was punishable by a $50 fine or imprisonment for up to one year.
2
Yet the laws did not prevent women who wanted the pill from getting it. Frustrated by laws that turned women as well as their doctors into criminals, in 1961 Estelle Gris- wold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, chair of the Depart- ment of Obstetrics at Yale University School of Medicine, opened a birth control clinic with the intent to challenge the law’s constitutionality. Their act of civil disobedience suc- ceeded in getting them arrested and prosecuted, and their case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1965, in
Gris- wold v. Connecticut
, the Supreme Court invalidated the Con- necticut law on the grounds that the constitutional right to privacy guaranteed married couples the right to make their own decisions about birth control. In 1972, in
Eisenstadt v. Baird
, the Supreme Court extended that right to unmarried individuals.
3

The pill was a factor in the increasing autonomy of women to assert their independence and make demands on professional experts and religious authorities—or to reject their advice alto- gether. The Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, the feminist movement, and the sexual revolution—all of this activism against failed national policies, gender discrimination, racial oppression, and rigid sexual codes—provided the context in which women took matters related to the pill into their own hands. By the mid-1960s, it was already becoming obvious that the pill was not a panacea for the world’s problems. But it was clearly a boon for individual women. Oral contraceptives con- tinued to be enormously popular, widely prescribed, and highly effective. At the same time, as a flash point for so many con- flicts and controversies, the pill became a vehicle for new laws, policies, and behaviors that altered the relationship between institutional authorities and individuals.

The most formidable institutional foe of the pill was the Catholic Church. Initially, it looked as though the Church’s position might be softening. Within a few months of the FDA’s approval, the nation elected its first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. In a marked contrast to his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had insisted that contraception was not a matter for public policy, the Catholic Kennedy sup- ported family planning. In 1964, a physician from the Alliance for Progress went to Rome to discuss South American popula- tion programs with the Pope, where he received a “warm re- ception.” The Church appeared to be on the verge of approving the use of contraceptives. According to
The Nation
, it looked like the “end of a taboo.”
4

Catholics comprised a quarter of the American population, but among this huge group and their clergy there was no pre- vailing consensus about birth control. As Church leaders de- bated the moral and theological questions surrounding contraception, Catholic women and men struggled to reconcile their faith with their personal needs and desires.
5
Looking back on his early adulthood, Colin S expressed the dilemma facing millions of American Catholics who grappled with the issue. A self-described “good Catholic boy,” he entered college in the late 1950s, attended Mass, and didn’t question the Church’s position on birth control. But in his junior year his girlfriend became pregnant. “Fortunately, or unfortunately, getting one’s girl pregnant was not a unique event on my all- male campus,” he recalled. “In my fraternity of sixty men, nine were married during my senior year. So we married in Febru- ary, but she miscarried immediately.” Even though they had al- ready experienced an unplanned pregnancy, he says, “We didn’t use birth control, except a lame attempt at the rhythm method, and I continued struggling with the ethics of birth control. Al- though I was not practicing my faith regularly, we had been married in the church, and I vaguely felt that birth control was wrong, but I wanted to take a critical look at the issue.”

For a class assignment to speak on a controversial subject, he chose the issue of the Church’s position on birth control. “I spoke to the Priest and to other Catholic students, and gave a speech that recited the Catholic position: God created sex for the primary purpose of reproduction; artificial contraception prevents that primary purpose and is therefore against the will of God.” Having persuaded himself, he tried to persuade his

wife. “She didn’t want to get pregnant, but was willing to go along with my conclusion that the rhythm method was the proper approach. It was about as effective as prayer as a con- traceptive strategy, however, and in the spring of senior year, she got pregnant.” Although they welcomed the baby, born in 1961, by that time the pill was available, and after much soul- searching they decided that “practical economics outweighed the position of the Church.” His wife went on the pill.
6

Like Colin and his wife, thousands of American Catholics were rejecting the Church’s ban. Many Catholic leaders and clergy were also calling for change. The popular press was filled with vehement arguments calling on the Vatican to allow for the use of contraceptives. According to
The Christian Cen- tury
in 1963, “There can be no doubt that the Roman Catholic Church is taking the wraps off the issue of birth control.” Fa- ther John A. O’Brien, a Catholic priest and professor of theol- ogy at the University of Notre Dame, told
U.S. News & World Report
that there was a large area of agreement among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews on the need for family planning. Al- though he noted that the only sanctioned method at the time was rhythm, his support for family planning among Catholics pointed the way toward a liberalized policy.
7

In 1964, Dr. Robert E. Hall, the director of the birth con- trol clinic of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, writing in
The Nation
, called upon the Ecumenical Coun- cil, which was reconvening in Rome, to approve family planning. Noting that half of all Catholics admitted to using artificial contraceptives, he railed at the Church’s stubborn insistence on condemning birth control. He dismissed the Church’s approval

of the rhythm method, saying, “Rhythm is not birth control at all, it is
sex control
.”
8

As Catholic doctors and clergy pushed Church authorities

to lift the ban, it appeared to many proponents that the pill might foster that change.
9
One of the most influential voices advocating change in the official Catholic position was John Rock, a devout and observant Catholic. A solid Republican for most of his life and no fan of sexual experimentation outside of marriage, Rock, along with many other Catholics, held that contraception was sometimes medically necessary and often personally desirable as a means to maintain happy marriages and well-planned families. Rock believed that married couples should have as many children as they could support but that contraception was important for those who could not afford large families. When the pill became available, he and many others believed that the Church would approve its use.
10

Long before Rock became involved in the development and testing of the pill, he had promoted the use of contra- ception. Although he was a Catholic doctor practicing in Massachusetts, where disseminating birth control informa- tion or devices was against the law, as early as the 1940s he regularly taught his students at Harvard Medical School how to insert diaphragms. When he began clinical trials of hor- monal contraceptives, he thought that the pill offered a means of birth control that the Church could accept. Because the pill simply repressed ovulation and replicated the body’s hormonal condition in early pregnancy, Rock argued that the pill didn’t obstruct the union of egg and sperm because there would be no egg available to fertilize. Nor did the pill block,