The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (15 page)

As scientists and individuals
, we wish to be on record as recognizing the importance of expanding research directed toward improvement and more widespread application of acceptable means of human fertility control. Based on our understanding of trends in population growth and resource utilization, and on our belief that research on fertility control will contribute significantly to the alleviation of basic problems underlying world tensions, we endorse this recognition with a strong sense of urgency.

Powerful words—except that no names were attached. If he didn’t know it already, Pincus could clearly see that there would be no groundswell of support from the scientific community.

“
I am rather surprised
that the Pincus plan does not receive more attention,” McCormick wrote to Sanger on October 1, 1952. “Perhaps it is considered too long-ranged and complicated—but I wonder if it is any more so than the others.” She reminded Sanger, who should have needed no reminding after nearly half a century of work, that a birth-control pill was not likely to be a simple invention, and that investors and organizations backing it would have to be patient. With her degree in science from MIT, and based on her visit to the Worcester Foundation months earlier, McCormick had become Sanger’s leading expert on the Pincus plan for contraceptive research. Or perhaps Sanger was merely pretending to be naïve in the hopes that her wealthy friend would step into a position of leadership.

“
It is pretty trying
not to be able to
push it
!” McCormick wrote to Sanger in another letter.

Sanger sympathized. “You are quite right in feeling as you do about research,” she wrote. “In a few months, perhaps
we can go see Dr. Pincus
.”

TEN

Rock’s Rebound

F
OR YEARS GREGORY
Pincus had been searching for a project that might establish his greatness, only to watch ideas come and go like love affairs, beginning with promise and ending in hurt feelings. His whole career thus far had been a recovery process, one attempt after another to start over. By now, he was smart enough to know that the quest for an oral contraceptive carried enormous risk. The pill could fail; it could cause serious side effects; it could stir caustic publicity and once again make him a pariah.

Despite the perils, however, the project was perfect for Pincus. It concerned the area of science he knew best: mammalian reproduction. It called for a scientist trained to think aggressively. And it required not only scientific knowledge but also an entrepreneurial spirit, which Pincus had developed since he’d been forced to leave Harvard. But the best reason the project suited Pincus was this: He had nothing to lose; his participation in a controversial project such as this one was unlikely to harm his reputation or professional standing any more than it had already been harmed. As one of his colleagues put it, “
He wasn’t afraid to go out on a limb
because he didn’t have any limb.”

Years of disappointment had taught Pincus that it wasn’t always the science that determined an experiment’s success; it was often the countless forces surrounding the science, some of which were within his control and some of which were not. What the pill project needed most now was not necessarily a biologist but a product champion—someone who could build the team to do the scientific work, forge alliances with manufacturers needed to supply chemicals, and, if all went well, spread the news of the coming invention so that it might have a chance at acceptance. Had Pincus still been on the faculty at Harvard, it’s unlikely he would have had the drug company connections that he cultivated on his own. Nor is it likely he would have had the high tolerance for risk that he did. In the years ahead, he would not only have to risk his reputation, he would also have to push the boundaries of law and ethics.

He knew what he had to do next: test progesterone on women. And to do that, he would have to add a player to his team—a doctor, preferably a gynecologist, someone who could reassure the patients involved in the experiments that they were safe and would convey to the drug companies supplying the progesterone that no one would be harmed by the experiments. He considered Dr. Abraham Stone, who was sixty-three years old and one of the nation’s leading experts on contraception. It was at Stone’s party in New York in the winter of 1950 that Pincus had first met Sanger and begun thinking about how a pill might be formulated. Sanger certainly would have approved of the choice, but Pincus worried that Stone, director of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, was too closely aligned with the cause to be objective. He would likely be seen as an advocate for birth control, giving the science a partisan tinge. He also considered Alan Guttmacher, chief of obstetrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, author of a popular marriage manual, and advisor to the Population Council. But Pincus worried that Guttmacher would be too busy to give the progesterone experiments his full attention. There was one more concern: Both Stone and Guttmacher were Jewish. Pincus, still feeling like he’d been stung by anti-Semitism at Harvard, worried that having another Jew on the team might invite criticism.

Pincus’s next choice was a physician named John Rock. Like Pincus, Rock was a Harvard man. Rock was respected by his peers and adored by his patients. He looked like a family physician from central casting in Hollywood: tall, slender, and silver-haired, with a gentle smile and a calm, deliberate manner. Even his name connoted strength, solidity, and reliability.

Rock had one more thing going for him: He was Catholic.

In 1890, John Rock was christened at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Marlborough, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he was so devout in his faith that he felt compelled to confess to his priest every time he felt a sexual urge or experienced an erection. He even wrote down the dates and the number of times of these occurrences until, at last, in the confessional booth, his priest told him: “
Don’t be so scrupulous, John
.”

He was the son of an Irish saloonkeeper. Though he was big, strong, and athletic, he often preferred playing with his sisters in the house rather than mixing it up on the streets or in the yard with his brothers. For this, his brothers sometimes called him a sissy. In the spring of 1907, while enrolled at the High School of Commerce in Boston and living in a boardinghouse with his fellow students, young John Rock may have fallen in love with a classmate named Ray Williams, who was the captain of the school’s basketball team.
Rock’s diary from 1907
is filled with excited scribbling about his time spent with Ray. In March of that year, however, something happened that prompted Rock to tear out pages from his diary. Sixty-five years later, as an old man reflecting on the dawn of his sexual conscience and his liberal views on sex and contraception, Rock mentioned sleeping in the same bed with a friend he refers to as
Ben
Williams and waking up with an erection and, summarily, an orgasm. In later years, Rock would show remarkable open-mindedness about varieties of sexual behavior. His friendship with Ray might have helped shape his thinking.

After high school, Rock surprised his working-class family by gaining admission to Harvard and studying to become a doctor. In 1926, he became director of the sterility clinic at the Free Hospital for Women in Boston. He loved his work and adored his patients. On busy days, he would
hustle between two exam rooms
, trying to see as many patients as possible without keeping anyone waiting too long. He would often ask his poorer patients if they needed bus fare home, and if the women were extremely uncomfortable in their pregnancies he would walk them out to a taxi stand and pay the driver in advance. In his carefully tailored suits, crisp shirts, and handsome ties (he seldom left the house without a tie or ascot), he was the picture of formal elegance. His clothes were not expensive. Rock would never betray his working-class roots, nor would he dress so ostentatiously as to intimidate his patients. But he insisted on conservative attire at all times when seen in public, and he was equally prescribed in manner. He worked with one nurse for twenty years without ever learning her first name; she was always “Mrs. Baxter”
and he was “Dr. Rock.”

Though he hung a crucifix over his desk at work, Rock’s religious and professional opinions often conflicted. While the Catholic Church opposed abortion, for example, Rock believed a woman’s health was more important than the health of her fetus and that pregnancies should be terminated when they imperiled patients’ lives. “Religion,” he used to tell his daughter, “is
a very poor scientist
.”

In 1936, while serving on the American Medical Association’s Committee on Maternal Health, he told fellow committee members he believed that sex was meant for reproduction, nothing more. “Nature intended motherhood to be woman’s career,” Rock said. Anything that diverted a woman from starting that career immediately upon marriage, he continued, “is socially wrong.” He’d heard of cases in which women wanted to postpone pregnancy so they could earn money to help their husbands finish their college degrees, but he had little patience for such wishes. Let the man postpone his education so the wife can have her baby, he said. As for sex, it could never “be made an end in itself
without dire consequences
.”

Over time, however, Rock underwent a fundamental change as compassion for his patients overwhelmed his compulsion to toe the Church’s line. He sympathized with women who came to his practice saying they were afraid of becoming pregnant again, whether it was because their bodies were worn out or because they couldn’t imagine caring for more children. Rock also began to see that many couples wanted contraception because they wanted to delay, not avoid, becoming parents. In 1931, he was one of fifteen Boston doctors (and the only Catholic) to sign a petition calling for the repeal of the state’s ban on contraception.

In 1925, Rock married Anna Thorndike, a Boston woman who shared his sense of adventure, having
served as an ambulance driver
in France during World War I. The Rocks married relatively late in life—he was thirty-five and she was twenty-nine. They had their first child eleven months after their wedding. Four more children came in the next six years. And then they stopped coming. Rock never discussed why or how.

He adored his wife and, unlike many men of his era, had no fear of showing his affection publicly with flowers, eloquent speeches, and stolen kisses in the hallway of their home. In his medical practice, Rock counseled pregnant women and delivered babies, but he also worked with women who could not conceive and came to believe that sexual intercourse offered an important bond for husbands and wives as they struggled unsuccessfully to have children. Too many priests, he said, confused the beauty of human coupling with animalistic copulation. Their obstinacy frustrated Rock and caused him to state his views on sex and love more boldly. By the 1950s he began to lecture on the subject, saying sex and love were inseparable. Only with love, he declared, could “orgasm reach its
natural fullness of ecstasy
.”

That was not exactly what he’d been taught by the priests.