The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

THE BIRTH
of
THE PILL

How Four Crusaders
Reinvented Sex and Launched
a Revolution

JONATHAN EIG

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK | LONDON

For Jennifer

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me)—

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

—PHILIP LARKIN, “ANNUS MIRABILIS”

Contents

THE BIRTH
of
THE PILL

ONE

A Winter Night

Manhattan,
Winter 1950

She was an old woman who loved sex and she had spent forty years seeking a way to make it better. Though her red hair had gone gray and her heart was failing, she had not given up. Her desire, she said, was as strong and simple as ever: She wanted a scientific method of birth control, something magical that would permit a woman to have sex as often as she liked without becoming pregnant. It struck her as a reasonable wish, yet through the years one scientist after another had told her no, it couldn’t be done. Now her time was running out, which was why she had come to an apartment high above Park Avenue to meet a man who was possibly her last hope.

The woman was Margaret Sanger, one of the legendary crusaders of the twentieth century. The man was Gregory Goodwin Pincus, a scientist with a genius IQ and a dubious reputation.

Pincus was forty-seven years old, five feet ten and a half inches tall, with a bristly mustache and graying hair that shot from his head in every direction. He looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx. He would speed into a room, working a Viceroy between his yellowed fingers, and people would huddle close to hear what he had to say. He wasn’t famous. He owned no scientific prizes. No world-changing inventions were filed under his name. In fact, for a long stretch of his career he had been an outcast from the scientific establishment, rejected as a radical by Harvard, humiliated in the press, and left with no choice but to conduct his varied and oftentimes controversial experiments in a converted garage. Yet he radiated confidence as if he knew the world would one day recognize his brilliance.

Pincus was a biologist and perhaps the world’s leading expert in mammalian reproduction. In the 1930s, at the start of his professional career, he’d attempted to breed rabbits in Petri dishes using much the same technology that decades later would lead to
in vitro
fertilization for humans. Then he was young and handsome and possessed of a limitless imagination. He posed for newspaper photographs and boasted to reporters that a new age of human reproduction was on the horizon, one in which men and women soon would employ modern methods to control the process of making babies. Science would lead the way.

But Americans were not ready to hear such things. The press compared him to Victor Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s fictional scientist, who tried to conjure life but accidentally created a monster. Harvard denied Pincus tenure, and no other university would hire him. He was deemed too dangerous.

At that point, a more humble man might have chosen a new line of work. A weaker man might have succumbed to anger or despair. But not Goody, as his friends and family called him, as much for his friendly nature as his middle name. For while Pincus was affectionate and disarming in social settings, when it came to his career he was, as one colleague put it, “
a street-fighting Jew
.” Getting knocked down was merely the thing that happened before Pincus got up to fight again. When Harvard dumped him and no other job offers arrived, he moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, a factory town, where a former colleague from Harvard had offered him a low-paying, low-ranking position as a researcher for Clark University. He worked in a basement lab where dust from a nearby coal bin contaminated his experiments. When he asked the university to provide him a proper laboratory,
the request was denied
.

Again, he might have quit. Instead, Pincus and one of his colleagues, Hudson Hoagland, did something unprecedented: they launched their own scientific research center. They went door to door in Worcester (pronounced
wuhstah
, in the local tongue) and the surrounding area, distributing brochures and asking housewives, plumbers, and hardware store owners to contribute—no donation too small—to a new institution they called the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. With the money they scraped together, they bought an old house in nearby Shrewsbury, where Pincus set up his office and lab in the garage. The operation was so lean in those early years that he cleaned his own animal cages and, at one even lower moment, moved his wife and children into a state-run insane asylum while conducting research there on schizophrenia.

Pincus knew about Sanger. Almost everyone in America did. It was Sanger who had popularized the term “birth control” and almost single-handedly launched the movement for contraceptive rights in the United States. Women would never gain equality, she had argued, until they were freed from sexual servitude. Sanger had opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 and helped launch dozens more around the world. But even after decades of work, the contraceptive devices available at those clinics—condoms and cervical caps, mostly—remained ineffective, impractical, or difficult to obtain. It was as if she’d been teaching starving people about nutrition without giving them anything healthy to eat. Sanger explained to Pincus that she was looking for an inexpensive, easy-to-use, and completely foolproof method of contraception, preferably a pill. It should be something biological, she said, something a woman could swallow every morning with her orange juice or while brushing her teeth, with or without the consent of the man with whom she was sleeping; something that would make sexual intercourse spontaneous, with no forethought or messy fumbling, no sacrifice of pleasure; something that would not affect a woman’s fertility if she wished to have children later in life; something that would work everywhere from the slums of New York to the jungles of southeast Asia; something 100 percent effective.

Could it be done?

The other scientists she’d approached, every one of them, had said no, and they had given her a long list of reasons. It was dirty, disreputable work. The technology wasn’t there. And even if it somehow could be done, there would be no point. Thirty states and the federal government still had anti-birth-control laws on the books. Why go to the trouble of making a pill no drug company would dare to manufacture and no doctor would dare prescribe?

But Sanger held out hope that Gregory Pincus was different, that he might be bold enough—or desperate enough—to try.

It was the midpoint of the century. Scientists were taking up matters of life and death that once had been the domain principally of artists and philosophers. Men in lab coats—and yes, they were almost all men—were heroes, winners of wars, battlers of disease, givers of life. Malaria, tuberculosis, and syphilis were among the many illnesses surrendering to modern medicine. Governments and giant corporations poured unprecedented sums of money into research, sponsoring everything from high school science clubs to cold fusion exploration. Health became a political issue as well as a social one. World War II had scarred the earth but also transformed it, offering the promise of a better, freer world, and scientists were leading the way.