The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (28 page)

The school shortage, the teacher shortage, the job shortage, the housing shortage, the hospital shortage, the nursing shortage, the power shortage, the shortage of roads, the forthcoming fight of labor for a guaranteed annual wage, the controversy over increased mechanization of industry, the disputes over wage rates, farm income, old age pensions, health insurance, and development of our national resources—all go back to the fact that America has a severe case of growing pains.

The Baby Boom was in full swing and no one knew where it would lead. The headline writer for the
Times
summed it up nicely: “
Babies, Babies, Babies—4,000,000 Problems
.”

A few months after the
New York Times
story appeared, leaders in the birth-control movement gathered in Puerto Rico for a conference sponsored by Planned Parenthood and designed to stir interest in contraception in Latin America. Sanger was too ill to attend and Pincus was too busy, but Dr. Rice-Wray gave a report that earned yet another mention in the
Times.
“When all Puerto Rican parents can have the number of children they want and can properly care for, much of the misery and desperation of our poorer classes can be eliminated,” she told the assembly. “Then employment opportunities, schooling, housing, medical and welfare service will have a chance of
meeting the needs of the people
.” During the conference, Planned Parenthood officials appealed to the World Health Organization to make child-spacing education part of its worldwide program of preventive medicine. They also asked the United Nations to recognize a woman’s right to birth control as a basic human freedom. The United Nations (with the United States abstaining from the vote) rejected the proposal.

The Catholic Church had threatened to picket the conference in Puerto Rico, but the pickets never arrived and the conference went off smoothly.

Week after week, population control made more headlines, and with each headline came an increasing sense that the problem was real, that the world’s natural and economic resources would never keep up with the extraordinary growth in the number of people inhabiting the earth. But there was also a growing sense, especially in America, that the Baby Boom was taking a psychological and emotional toll on the mothers responsible for raising all those children. It had seemed funny in 1950, when Myrna Loy and Clifton Webb had starred in the movie
Cheaper by the Dozen
, based on the true story of a husband and wife with twelve children. The father, Frank Gilbreth, is an efficiency expert who tests his theories on his children. The trailer for the film called it a “laugh riot.”

But within a few years of the movie’s release, Americans began to take the matter more seriously. In a special report titled “The Plight of the Young Mother,”
Ladies’ Home Journal
reported that women were working as much as a hundred hours a week for their families—far more than their husbands—even when the women were in poor health. Was this really the best way to raise children? It was a question, the magazine declared, that “demands national attention.”

“We don’t have a bathtub and we have small children, so I have to bathe all three children in the kitchen sink,” Mrs. Edward B. McKenzie, a mother of three from St. Louis, told the magazine. “It’s a problem to get supper cooked with three hungry, tired little babies, and then fly and get the dishes all done, and fly and put them all three in the sink, and then get the baby to sleep first. Then I read the other two a story, and get them to bed. All that time I am wondering, ‘Can I get it all done today?’ ”

Another woman said she gave herself a break from the hectic pace by not washing the family’s clothing one day a week. Another said she found a few moments of peace each day by “getting outdoors” to hang out the wash and then again to bring it in when it dried.

Then there was Mrs. Richard Petry, a mother of four from Levittown, Pennsylvania, who insisted that her husband let her work once or twice a week. Why? “To see some people and talk to people—just to see what is going on in the world,” she said. Mrs. Petry found a job at a department store, working between six and nine hours a week, but after three weeks of covering for her over a span of hours that added up to only one day, her husband couldn’t take it anymore. “
I wouldn’t have your job for anything
,” he told her.

One woman was asked if she’d ever had a vacation from housework. “Just in the hospital, having my babies,” she said, adding, “
if you call that a vacation
.”

Soon after the conference in Puerto Rico, a science reporter for the United Press Association broke a big story that, while fuzzy on details, got much of the thrust right. It began:

Scientists striving to give the human race a simple and sure way of controlling its prodigious and alarming fertility—for example, something as easy as taking an aspirin—believe they are on the verge of success. They’re talking very reluctantly when they talk at all, since no scientist wants to rouse false expectations. But this writer has been given good reason for believing that several easy “aspirin tablet” ways which act on the fertility of animals now are being tested—
very quietly and privately
—in human beings.

The United Press story went on to say that the pill would likely use hormones to “antagonize” the body’s production of sperm or eggs. Planned Parenthood had already spent about $300,000 on the research, the writer noted, although he either didn’t seek or else failed to obtain comment from any of the researchers involved.

As the publicity intensified and newspaper editorials expressed growing concern over population growth and support for the development of better contraception, McCormick decided there was no longer any point in keeping the Pincus project quiet. She and Sanger were receiving little support from Planned Parenthood and none from government. Some within the movement were even beginning to wonder if Sanger was losing her grip. She spent much of her time in bed, and she relied on an ever-tightening circle of wealthy patrons, McCormick foremost among them, to fund her work. Like Pincus at the Worcester Foundation, Sanger appeared to be operating the International Planned Parenthood Federation on a month-to-month,
project-by-project basis
, raising funds as she went along, with no endowment, no safety net, no long-range plan. If Sanger had died, it’s likely the whole operation would have collapsed.

With no time to waste, McCormick asked Pincus if he would consider traveling with Sanger to Tokyo in October to present a paper on his discovery at the Fifth International
Conference of the International Planned Parenthood Federation
.

Never one to avoid publicity or to say no to his wealthy patron, Pincus agreed.

He finished his visit to McCormick’s home and stepped into the frigid Boston air to catch a train back to Worcester, his car still laid up from its losing battle with an icy road. When Pincus left, McCormick sat down and wrote a five-page letter to Sanger, telling her about Pincus’s frightening crash and all the exciting things he’d had to say in their three hours together that afternoon.

Yet despite all the encouraging news, McCormick closed with her usual impatience: “
I do wish the field tests
were not so desperately slow!” she wrote. She mailed the letter special delivery, eager that Sanger read it as soon as possible.

TWENTY-ONE

A Deadline to Meet

N
OW PINCUS HAD
a deadline: October 28, 1955. On that date, he would stand before a room full of scientists and population control experts and announce that he had done it at last—he had discovered an oral contraceptive that would give women control of their reproductive systems. The fact that he had not yet settled on a precise formula for this pill or tested it on more than a handful of women
did not bother him
. It was only March. He had seven months.

For Pincus, two progestins—norethynodrel and norethindrone— remained particularly promising, because they were both more powerful than natural progesterone and seemed to work when taken orally. He intended to test both. Beginning in the spring of 1955, Dr. David Tyler recruited twenty-three female medical students at the University of Puerto Rico to serve as Pincus’s latest subjects. If the tests went well, there would still be time to include the data in his presentation in Japan. Tyler promised he would do everything possible to deliver results. For starters, he told his female students they were required as part of their coursework to enroll in the clinical trial and if any of them stopped taking the pills and submitting to the urine tests, temperature readings, and Pap smears, he would “
hold it against her
when considering grades.”

Even that kind of strong-arming proved insufficient. Within three months, more than half of Tyler’s twenty-three students had dropped out of the trials, either because the pills made them sick or because the tests were so bothersome.

Pincus and Tyler moved on to Plan B. This time, they asked nurses from San Juan City Hospital to enroll in the study. They refused.

On to Plan C. The scientists approached the director of a women’s prison at Vega Baja in Puerto Rico to help enroll inmates. The inmates refused, too.

By summer’s end, the trials were once again suspended.

Tyler told Pincus he thought he knew what they’d been doing wrong. They’d been counting on doctors, teachers, and prison guards to find subjects, which often meant they were attempting to persuade the uninterested. The trials needed a passionate leader, someone devoted to the birth-control cause, someone who could work on it full-time, and someone who knew how to get out in the community and find the Puerto Rican women who truly wanted and needed a better form of birth control. They needed to find women who wanted what they were offering instead of trying to force it on those who didn’t. Otherwise, Tyler said, “
it will not succeed
.”

On March 31, 1955, Pincus and his wife arrived in Tucson to visit Margaret Sanger. Goody went almost nowhere without his wife, and his colleagues were well accustomed to her presence at cocktail parties and dinners after scientific conferences. She was the squirt of oil that kept Goody loose, reminding him to get out of the lecture halls and labs and go see the sights. They flew to town on a cool day with thunderstorms sweeping across the desert. Sanger was already playing host to visitors from Japan, so she had no room in her home for additional guests and arranged for the Pincuses to stay at the Arizona Inn, which had been built in 1930 by Arizona’s first congresswoman, Isabella Greenway, in part to help create jobs for disabled World War I veterans.

Though the conference in Japan remained seven months away, Sanger was pouring much of her energy into preparations. She vowed to friends and supporters that she would avoid traveling and would reduce her workload so she could build up strength for the big trip. She continued to take the painkiller Demerol, as well as nitroglycerine for her heart, but she’d recently managed to wean herself from Seconal,
which she took for insomnia
. “I have given up sleeping pills entirely!!” she wrote to a friend. “At first it was terrible, just lying awake & thinking, then reading then writing & finally I thought of warm milk & a gigger of brandy. I was asleep in five minutes. I took milk with less & less brandy &
now I do not need anything
.”

Though Pincus’s pill was still almost entirely untested on women and he hadn’t even settled on exactly which pill he intended to test, Sanger believed that the biologist’s announcement would be the big news from the conference. At the same time, Lader was about to publish his biography of Sanger. With her life story in print and the great goal of that life seemingly within reach, these should have been heady days for her. But since her first heart attack in 1949, her eccentricities had grown more pronounced, and so had her consumption of alcohol and drugs. She had begun gathering her papers and public correspondence so that they might be preserved in the archives of Smith College, but reading through the yellowed pages of her youth opened “
veins of sadness
,” as she described it. The sadness only deepened as old friends and lovers died off one by one. On the advice of her friend, Juliet Rublee, Sanger enrolled in a Rosicrucian mail-order course to help her learn to communicate with the “cosmic forces.”