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50 Years of the Birth Control Pill in America
Author and academic Elaine Tyler May talks about the history behind the birth control pill, what contraception for men might look like, and how LGBTQ people factor in to the debate.
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A woman holding a pack of birth control pills. In 2010 "the pill" turns 50.
This year the birth control pill turns 50. Most commonly know as just "the pill," the oral hormonal contraceptive was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration on May 9, 1960. It was available for sale to married women on June 23, 1960, though it took a battle with the Supreme Court to guarantee that right to all married women in 1965. That right was eventually extended to all women in another Supreme Court decision in 1972. Today the pill is so much a part of everyday life for many women. Still, the pill remains controversial; anti-choice groups still try to wrongly claim the pill causes abortions and many family planning advocates worry that public policy would be used to restrict access to the contraceptive rather than expand it.
Campus Progress caught up with Elaine Tyler May, historian at the University of Minnesota and author of the digestible new history America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation. She tells us why she got so interested in the subject in the first place, speculates on male birth control’s future, and talks about how LGBTQ people fit into the debate over birth control.
What inspired you to write the book?
I have a family history that’s very much tied up with the history of the pill. My parents were very involved in the birth control movement. My father was one of the developers of the birth control pill. He was an endocrinologist, a physician who conducted some of the early clinical trials of oral contraceptives and was quite involved in the development of the pill. My mother was an activist in the birth control movement and together they established some birth control clinics, Planned Parenthood clinics, in the Los Angeles area. Together they worked in the field of family planning and reproductive medicine. I grew up with these issues and I was 12 years old in 1960 when the pill was approved. It was a moment that I remember very vividly and a very exciting time in my family.
Sanger was first and foremost a feminist. She came to her passion about birth control by being a public health nurse and seeing women sickened and dying because of being overburdened by too many pregnancies or illegal abortions … Now she was also a political operator and understood that she needed allies in the medical community to really be able achieve the access to women that she felt was so important. She knew without the medical community she would not have success in those early decades. She did align herself with a lot of doctors and other medical professionals who were very interested in the eugenics movement.
She was perhaps overzealous in her eugenic kinds of proclamations, but ultimately she helped to establish birth control clinics in black neighborhoods because she felt black women deserved to have as much access to contraception as their wealthier, middle-class, white contemporaries had. Most black women really appreciated that, even though some black women were suspicious of the motives of the people who established birth control clinics in their neighborhoods.
She’s been, on one level deservedly criticized for some of her statements but at the same time, most of the research that’s been done on Sanger now would validate her concerns for poor women and for black women. They do not see her as a racist or having genocidal kinds of motives. There’s no evidence of that.
What about Barbara Seaman, the leading advocate to make the pill safer when dosages were too high?
The unfortunate piece of the Seaman story is that other people used her for sinister purposes—most dramatically and most gravely the developer and manufacturer of the Dalkon Shield. [Hugh Davis] was a doctor who became an ally of Seaman’s and actually wrote the forward to one of the editions of her book, saying, "The birth control is terrible. Women should not take the pill. They should all give up the pill and use my product, the Dalkon Shield IUD. It’s safe, it’s effective, and it’s much better for women than the pill."
As we know now, the Dalkon Shield was catastrophic for women, much, much more harmful than any other contraceptive product that’s ever been on the market. He knew it at the time because he was manipulating and distorting and hiding the findings of his own research. … That’s an unfortunate situation that Seaman couldn’t have anticipated.
Overall the impacts of the women’s health movement and the challenges to the pill have been good. Maybe sometimes they were exaggerated; maybe sometimes they scared women away from the pill by claiming that the pill was more dangerous than it actually was. On the other hand it’s important for consumers, and it’s important for women to always be able to make demands of the producers of the products that are going to be going into their bodies.
I thought the chapter on male birth control was fascinating. Based on your research, do you think male birth control will ever happen? If it does, how might that affect the politics of birth control?
It’s dangerous to ask a historian to talk about the future. [laughs] I think it’s certainly very possible we may end up with a male oral contraceptive or contraceptive method. Over the last 50 years we’ve had dozens of new birth control for women but not one new method for men. The condom is still the only birth control method that is geared toward men.
Some interesting research is still going on. I just learned from a colleague of mine here at the University of Minnesota in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology that she’s involved in some new research on a non-hormonal birth control pill for men. I’m eager to hear more about that. There are a lot of new products that are in the early stages that have a lot of potential.
I think the real question will be whether or not men will be willing to take a birth control pill because men are not at risk of getting pregnant. They are, however at risk of having children and that’s very real. There are many men who have indicated that if there were a pill with reasonable and acceptable side effects that they would be interested in taking it and sharing the burden of contraception.
Where do LGBTQ people fit into the debate over contraception?
I heard from one young woman who’s a student and a lesbian and she talked about the fact that her own look is very feminine and when she goes to the doctor, she’s always been encouraged to go on the birth control pill, even though she is not bisexual. She’s a lesbian. As she wrote to me, she partners with a woman who is more masculine-looking. When she goes into the doctor she’s treated as though she were a heterosexual even though she tells them she’s a lesbian whereas her partner goes in and does not even get adequate health care that most women are entitled to because they see her as not really completely a woman. The medical establishment still has ways of responding to women according to how they present themselves. That leads to some serious discriminatory practices.
Kay Steiger is the editor of Campus Progress.
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