Woman of Valor (60 page)

With her husband's death, Katherine McCormick inherited more than $15 million and in the fall of 1950 asked Margaret for advice about how to put it to good use. Margaret immediately suggested that she fund a crash program of $100,000 per year to be distributed to several university laboratories. This was to be handled by a new Committee on Human Reproduction that Planned Parenthood was trying to organize under the auspices of the National Research Council, the same group that subsequently helped get the Population Council started. Complications involving the disposition of her husband's estate delayed her acting on this recommendation, and the council proposal died for lack of funding. But McCormick did send $5,000 for Margaret's international efforts and offered her seaside estate in Santa Barbara as a retreat from which to organize the Bombay conference.

McCormick also made a few small contributions of several thousand dollars to a research fund established by Planned Parenthood in memory of Robert Dickinson. The money was, in turn, contributed to the Worcester Foundation for preliminary investigations in hormonal contraception being conducted by Dr. Pincus and his collaborator, M. C. Chang, an investigator of mammalian reproduction who has since gained international renown. This investment paid off handsomely when early results demonstrated conclusively that injections of progesterone suppressed ovulation in rabbits and that oral administration of the hormone had a 90 percent rate of effectiveness.

“These data demonstrate definitely the contraceptive ovulation-inhibiting activity of an oral progestin, and suggest that with proper dosage and regimen of administration control of ovulation may be effective,” Gregory Pincus wrote in a progress report to Planned Parenthood in 1952. The findings did not generate much enthusiasm from William Vogt, however, who never even bothered to communicate them to Katherine McCormick, even though she was financing the work and was clearly in a position to fund an expanded clinical research agenda, if necessary. Privy by then to the Population Council's decision to pursue an exclusive research agenda in demography and biomedicine, Vogt had all but decided to leave research to them and concentrate Planned Parenthood's meager resources on education and clinic organization.
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Totally bewildered by Vogt's indifference, Margaret and Katherine McCormick took the situation into their own hands and traveled to Shrewsbury in June of 1953 for a historic meeting with Dr. Pincus, where McCormick immediately promised $10,000, a commitment that would grow exponentially within a year. Vogt, who had never even bothered to visit the Worcester facility, insisted that they were wasting their money and particularly disparaged a $50,000 commitment toward the construction of an expanded animal testing facility. Seriously misjudging McCormick's single-mindedness when she subsequently came to see him in New York, he asked her for money to expand his administrative offices without ever fully explaining his revised priorities. The entire situation, as she described it to Margaret, was “vague and puzzling—really mystifying.”

McCormick returned to her home in Boston and made the Worcester Foundation the focus of her life until she died at the age of ninety-two in 1967, while awaiting the dedication of a women's dormitory she had also contributed to MIT. By that time, she'd given Pincus and his colleagues more than $2 million and left them another $1 million in her will. Until the marketing of the first anovulant birth control pill, she would channel a token amount of that money, through Planned Parenthood as a tribute to Margaret, who reluctantly conceded that the organization's name might lend credibility to the project despite her utter contempt for its leadership.
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With Mrs. McCormick's support, Dr. Pincus set Dr. Chang to work with his newly housed rabbits and rats, testing hundreds of different steroid compounds prepared by chemists in the laboratories of G. D. Searle, which became the only participant in the project to benefit financially when it patented the formula that proved most effective as Enovid, its first oral contraceptive. At the same time, Pincus moved quickly to initiate human testing under the auspices of John Rock, M.D., a senior Harvard professor in gynecology and obstetrics, with whom he was already collaborating on sterility research. At Pincus's suggestion, Rock tried out a twenty-day cycle of progesterone, interrupted to allow for menstruation, on a small group of highly motivated, middle-class women in his sterility practice at the Lying-in Hospital in Brookline. It quickly became clear that the regimen inhibited ovulation while in regular use, and when terminated, actually increased the likelihood of conception, providing a potential benefit in cases of sterility. Dosages were gradually lowered to decrease such side effects as nausea and tenderness of the breast, and a fortuitous accident then all but eliminated a third problem of breakthrough bleeding. Laboratory contamination of a batch of the substance with a small amount of estrogen suggested the advisability of combining the two hormones, and the essential compound that Searle would eventually market, and others would copy, was considered ready for mass testing.

McCormick would involve herself in virtually every stage of Dr. Rock's clinical investigations, defending him all the while to Margaret, who at first objected to his participation in the effort, because, despite his demonstrated interest in contraception, Rock was a practicing Catholic. Dr. Rock, however, attempted to reconcile his scientific and religious beliefs by arguing that a pill created from synthetic hormones inhibiting ovulation would provide no less “natural” than periodic continence, and while the Vatican would never accept this rationale, he became an important salesman for the pill and even earned Margaret's confidence. “Being a good R.C. and as handsome as a god,” she would later admit to Martha Rockefeller, “he can just about get away with anything.”

Margaret's concern about Rock also reflected her sentimental investment in the reputation of the Margaret Sanger Clinic as a first-class research facility. She insisted that clinical testing be conducted there as well and even cajoled McCormick into paying for it. Outside of a few women in the clinic's sterility service, however, Abraham Stone was never able to come up with substantial numbers willing to cooperate, although his 1956 report on a negligible sample of thirteen did confirm Rock's optimistic conclusions.

Finding women with the motivation, time, and tenacity to participate in the testing of an oral contraceptive was not easy. The procedure involved frequent temperature and urine analysis, vaginal smears, and of course the risks and side effects of taking an experimental medication. Pincus and Rock also used a small group of mental patients in Worcester, a standard practice of this era before the research exposes of the following decade, but McCormick's impatience for a foolproof survey was already apparent in 1955 when she demanded of Margaret: “How can we get a ‘cage' of ovulating females to experiment with?”
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So confident were the two women of the pill's revolutionary consequences that they seemed positively immune to any objection to it whatsoever and interpreted reasonable concerns about the liabilities of experimenting with so potent a drug as just one more round in the arsenal of opposition that birth control advocates had confronted for years. Had she been younger, McCormick acknowledged at one point, she would have happily participated in the research herself.

When official announcement of the historic scientific breakthrough came in a 1956 article in the magazine
Science
, Margaret dashed off a note to McCormick with the fervor of a schoolgirl. She wrote:

“Nothing matters to me now that we have oral contraception,” McCormick responded enthusiastically several months later. “Pincus' genius brought us the oral contraceptive we have been seeking and now we must implement it. We must keep on testing indefinitely—that goes without saying.”
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The very prospect of scientific progress had revived Margaret and rekindled her enthusiasm for missionary work on behalf of the birth control movement. From her meeting with Dr. Pincus in Shrewsbury in June of 1953, she went to visit Juliet at Cornish, then on to Smith College, Fishers Island, and the Connecticut home of her old friends Betty and Herbert Simonds, who had sold their company that manufactured diaphragms and jellies to Ortho Pharmaceuticals. In August, she then sailed for an IPPF conference in Stockholm, traveling with Harriet Pilpel, Planned Parenthood's longtime lawyer, as her companion.

Years later Pilpel could still recall the fanfare that attended Margaret's arrival in Sweden. She was welcomed with bouquets of flowers and christened an “international citizen” of the world. At a closing dinner she delivered an anecdotal speech on the history of the birth control movement, which is preserved on tape in the Smith archives. Her tenuous and frail voice is nonetheless absorbing. A seasoned orator, she had learned to speak in public with a good sense of timing and the ability to balance anecdote and humor with more profound and inspirational observations about the enterprise in which her audience was engaged.

“Build thou beyond thyself, but first be sure that thou thyself be strong in body and mind,” she quoted from an Indian proverb and then continued in a similar inspirational vein:

Portions of the speech were subsequently broadcast as a “This I Believe” segment on CBS radio to an audience estimated at 39 million Americans, and the script was also selected by Voice of America for distribution overseas. Margaret was especially pleased by the attention, because interest generated by the publication of the Kinsey Report earlier that year had been making her feel unappreciated and forgotten.
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Unhappy just playing muse to the struggling new international organization, Margaret then insisted on more active involvement. She returned from Tucson to New York in December to participate in the drafting of an organizational plan dividing IPPF's seventeen member-nations into three regions worldwide, one in the West to raise consciousness and money, and two in the East, where the needs were great and the money would be spent. The plan contemplated a $250,000 annual budget and, for the first time in her long history as an advocate and organizer, it also provided that her own personal expenses be covered. Hugh Moore, the entrepreneurial founder of the Dixie Cup Corporation and a recent convert to the world population cause, also assigned Tom Greissemer, a capable young executive in his employ, to work full-time out of the Sanger Clinic in New York. Almost all the money the two men raised, however, was consumed by administrative overhead, and, for the time being, the only significant developments abroad would require indigenous foreign support.

By 1954, a group of private Japanese citizens was ready to advance family planning there under the leadership of Shidzue Kato. In April, IPPF sent Margaret to participate in the first national meeting of the newly chartered Japan Federation of Family Planning. The group was then invited to affiliate formally with the international federation—over the strident objections of such members as Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, who was never bashful about expressing her contempt for the people who recently had so aggressively pursued a position of dominance in Asia.

Margaret, with her deep admiration of Japanese culture, refused to blame the sins of its military on its civilians. The highlight of her third visit to the country was an address to the Committee of Public Welfare in the House of Councillors of the Diet, arranged by Mrs. Kato, who had moved over to this senior parliamentary chamber in 1950 and would serve there for another twenty years. It was the first time a foreigner had ever been invited to address the national legislature. But Margaret's testimony regrettably betrayed her deteriorated health. Overwhelmed by the emotion of the occasion and by the fatigue of travel, she rambled on when given the opportunity to speak and seemed to stimulate interest in what she was saying only with a passing reference to the historic, scientific research going on in Shrewsbury and Boston, a subject she was not at liberty to discuss further. During her trip to Tokyo, however, she also helped organize the family planning conference scheduled there for the following year, the historic significance of which would derive from the fact that Gregory Pincus used the occasion to report for the first time on his preliminary findings. Margaret valiantly attended the event over the protestations of a family growing increasingly concerned about her health, and she was officially presented to Emperor Hirohito.

Heads of state were, indeed, beginning to take notice of the population issue, especially following meetings held in Rome in the fall of 1954 by the United Nations in conjunction with the Union for the Scientific Study of Population, the group that had been founded years earlier at the Geneva Conference. Data were presented at this time showing an alarming worldwide birthrate of 40,000 babies per day, but a coalition of Catholics and Communists blocked all recommendations for action. An International Planned Parenthood Federation application for membership as a consultive organization to the United Nations Economic and Social Council was then voted down in 1955, with the United States abstaining. Constrained by a handful of its members, the United Nations would refuse to endorse affirmative family planning policies or support any programs until the late 1960s.
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