Combined oral contraceptive pill

The combined oral contraceptive pill emerged because a 71-year-old activist, a 47-year-old scientist disgraced by academic politics, a 75-year-old heiress, and a Catholic doctor decided to give women control over their own fertility. No government funded it; no major corporation championed it. The pill was created by outsiders.

Margaret Sanger, founder of what became Planned Parenthood, had campaigned for birth control since the 1910s. In 1950, she met Gregory Pincus at a Manhattan dinner party. Pincus was a brilliant reproductive biologist who had been denied tenure at Harvard after his work on in vitro fertilization generated controversy. Now running the small Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Massachusetts, he was hungry for research funding and a chance to prove himself.

Sanger introduced Pincus to Katharine McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune and an MIT-trained biologist. McCormick had spent decades caring for her schizophrenic husband and was now a widow with money to spend on causes she believed in. She would eventually contribute approximately $2 million—equivalent to perhaps $20 million today—to fund the pill's development.

Meanwhile, in Mexico City on October 15, 1951, chemist Carl Djerassi at Syntex synthesized norethindrone—the first orally active synthetic progestin. Djerassi had no interest in contraception; Syntex was pursuing the hormone market for other medical applications. But his compound proved critical: it could be taken by mouth and suppress ovulation.

Pincus recruited John Rock, a Harvard-affiliated Catholic obstetrician who had been treating infertility with hormones. Rock provided clinical credibility and access to patients. The combination was improbable: a Jewish scientist, a Protestant activist, a Catholic doctor, and a wealthy widow who had spent her life fighting for women's education.

G.D. Searle pharmaceuticals licensed the compound and conducted trials. On May 9, 1960, the FDA approved Enovid for contraceptive use—with the cautious limitation of no more than two years of continuous use. The agency was venturing into unexplored territory: a drug taken by healthy women for years to prevent a natural biological process.

Adoption was explosive. Within two years, 1.2 million American women were using the pill. By 1965, that number exceeded 6.5 million. Women could now separate sex from reproduction reliably, without depending on partners, without physical devices, without timing or luck.

Pincus died in 1967, just seven years after his creation's approval. 'It seems unbelievable,' a later historian wrote, 'that a group of brave, rebellious misfits made such a radical breakthrough and did it with no government funds and comparatively little corporate money.' The pill was not inevitable—it was willed into existence by people who refused to accept that women's fertility was not theirs to control.