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Endocrine Disrupters and the Pill
- Introduction
- How EDs Work
- Our Stolen Future
- Drugs in the Environment
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Examples of EDs
- Government Testing
- Laws
- The Pill as an ED
- History of the Pill
- Case Study: Coastal Waters
- Case Study: Fish
- Case Study: Men in Italy
- Solutions
- What you can do!
- Further Information
Comments & questions to:
khornbach@macalester.edu
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History of Pill
There are four people to thank for the invention of
the birth control pill: two activist women and two doctors. The first
is Margaret Sanger, who was born in 1879 and grew up during a time when
contraceptives were illegal due to the Comstock Act. By 1910, Sanger
was working tirelessly against the law, distributing information and
contraceptive devices to women. It's said that Sanger's devotion is due
in large part to the fact that she was one of eleven children in a
working class family. Her mother passed away at just 50 years of age,
after her body began to show the strain of eleven childbirths and seven
miscarriages. To escape her family, Sanger went to nursing school in an attempt to become self-suffpictureicient.
It was in her work that Sanger became even more convinced of the need
for contraception as she watched largely poor immigrant women suffer
from unwanted pregnancies. Many of these forced these women to have
illegal back-alley abortions that were very dangerous. Sanger married
and had three children, but did not end her battle for birth control
rights, instead she found herself in trouble with the law, twice. Once
in 1915 for sending diaphragms through the mail and again in 1916 for
opening a birth control clinic. In 1921, Sanger founded the American
Birth Control League, the early name of Planned Parenthood. Sanger had
always wanted to find a cheap, effective, and easy way for women to
deal with pregnancy, but so far she had been unable to do so. In 1951,
She met with Gregory Pincus, a medical expert in the field of human
reproduction.
Pincus was born in 1903 and had attended Cornell
University. He later taught at Harvard, where he began research on the
sexual physiology of mammals. In 1934 Pincus accomplished in-vitro
fertilization of rabbits. Pincus' achievement was not heralded as a
scientific achievement, instead he was considered a mad scientist, this
is due largely to the publication of Brave New World shortly
before. Pincus was denied tenure at Harvard and became desperate to
find work, until a friend offered him a lab position at Clark
University. In 1953, t wo
years after first meeting Sanger, she approached Pincus with wealthy
heiress Katherine McCormick to attempt to convince him to try to create
a new form of birth control.
McCormick was born in 1875 and grew up in a wealthy Chicago family. Breaking convention, she
attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology receiving a
bachelor's degree in biology. After graduating, she married Stanley
McCormick, a wealthy heir to a large fortune. Only two years after
being married, however, Stanley McCormick developed schizophrenia and
suffered from severe dementia. At this time it was believed that
schizophrenia was hereditary, so Katherine McCormick vowed never to
have children. She became an advocate for women's rights, where
she met Margaret Sanger. McCormick's husband died in 1947, leaving her
in control of a vast estate. Sanger helped convince her to invest in
female contraception pills, bringing her to meet with Pincus.
By this point, Pincus had already discovered that
progesterone works as an anti-ovulent, and now, with proper funding, he
was able to fully pursue the work. However, Pincus needed to conduct
human trials and therefore convinced Dr. John Rock to use his
thriving fertility clinic to start trials. Rock was a devout Catholic,
who supported the right of married women to use contraception. The
results of the tests were conclusive showing that synthetic
progesterone was effective as a form of birth control. However large
scale trials were needed, and both doctors were beginning to be more
restricted by laws against human testing and contraception, so Puerto
Rico became the site of large scale testing in 1956. In the same year,
Pincus in conjunction with pharmaceutical giant Searle submitted Enovid
as the first oral contraceptive. In 1957, the FDA approved Enovid, but
only for help solving menstrual problems in women. By 1959, nearly half
a million women are taking Enovid for "menstrual problems," and just a
year later the pill is cleared as a form of birth control.
Enovid uses a high dose of synthetic progesterone to
regulate a woman's cycle. During the 1960's Searle continued to work on
the pill, finally clearing with the FDA a lower dosage version o f the pill. In 1962 competitive versions of the pill are finally allowed to enter the market
and just a year later it is reported that 2.3 American women are using
the pill. In 1967 put the worldwide number of women using at 12.5
million. A major step for women's rights was achieved in 1972, when the
US Supreme Court case of Eisenstadt versus Baird ruled that a US state
could not prohibit the distribution of the pill to unmarried women,
opening new doors for women's rights. By 1984 an estimated 50 to
80 million women are on the pill worldwide. Since then though, the pill
has remained a contentious issue. Levels of active hormones have
been lowered continually, with the new "low dose" pills being what
almost every woman is prescribed now. Also, many brands of pills are
now a combination of both progesterone and estrogen. The controversy
still boils though, with the possibility of new laws being enacted,
which would allow pharmacists to refuse selling the pill to women if
they object to it on moral grounds. While McCormick, Sanger, Rock, and
Pincus helped develop a scientific break through, it is as
controversial today as it was then.
All information on this page is from the American Experience website on the Pill
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Last updated: 5/2/2006
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