Pharmaceutical Holiday
Can you imagine the FDA approving a drug that, say, increased the risk of blood clots, hypertension, stroke, heart attacks, breast cancer, and migraines for women? And fathom, if you will, the absurd notion that such a drug could be approved for the treatment of something that isn’t even a disease, a genetic abnormality, or a mental disorder but the very way that God designed women’s bodies to work.
Well, fasten your Malthusian belts, because they did. Now here’s where you’d expect a very special Dateline NBC exposé or an investigative report from Katie Couric to unmask this conspiratorial threat to women’s health. Instead, she called it “a tiny tablet that revolutionized women’s health,” before blasting the government for not giving it to every single woman for free.
And then the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Time, and all of the TV networks threw a party to celebrate its birthday.
In the mid-1950’s, when many American women were using Lysol to keep from having babies, Gideon Daniel (“G.D.”) Searle (formerly of Metamucil fame) struck gold. Frank Colton, a researcher at his pharmaceutical company in Skokie, Illinois, had created a synthetic progesterone compound (norethynodrel), with a mind to curing “female problems.” Dr. Gregory Pincus heard about it and asked for some of it to test his theories about the relationship between progesterone and the prevention of ovulation. (Lucky for him, he had money to burn, thanks to his friend Margaret Sanger and her rich pal, Cyrus McCormick’s daughter Katharine.)
Pincus assembled a team led by Dr. John Rock, a Roman Catholic fertility expert who publicly rejected Church teaching on contraception, and they began experimenting on women, inducing “false pregnancies.” Meanwhile, back in Skokie, Searle researchers developed their drug, reducing the amount of mestranol (estrogen) in their compound to prevent bleeding. They called it Enovid and shipped it off to Team Pincus for testing on women in Puerto Rico and Haiti.
According to Planned Parenthood, Puerto Rico was chosen because, unlike Dr. Rock’s native Massachusetts, the island “had no laws against contraception.” Bonus!
Many of the women were semi-literate or illiterate, which allowed the researchers to test whether or not the pill could also be used by women around the world, regardless of their educational accomplishments.
G.D. Searle & Co. applied for FDA approval of Enovid for the treatment of menstrual problems at the same time it was organizing a symposium with Team Pincus on marketing the drug as a combined oral contraceptive. The FDA approved it for the former use in 1957, and two years later, Searle applied for the government’s approval of the latter use. Enovid officially became The Pill on June 23, 1960. One year later, a million women had already used it. Four years later, Searle was up to $24 million in annual profits.
The Pill has had a side effect or two on American culture, not the least being the Sexual Revolution. In addition, writes Gardiner Harris in the New York Times, “in regulatory terms, the pill brought about a kind of reformation.”
Because Team Pincus’s tests on the Puerto Ricans had been “relatively brief,” the FDA had no good reason (other than social pressure) to approve the drug for long-term use. So they slapped an arbitrary two-year limit on prescription durations. But women were so wild for The Pill that they simply asked for it under a different brand, consequences be damned.
It turned out that Pincus had ignored the evidence presented by his team which indicated that 17 percent of the illiterate women had experienced a host of side effects from chemically altering their otherwise healthy bodies—vomiting, headaches, nausea. (Pincus dismissed the women as hypochondriacs.) Added to that in the early 60’s were increasing reports of pulmonary embolism, congestive heart failure, and pulmonary tuberculosis.
What to do? If the FDA pulled The Pill, women would be forced to return to sexual servitude. The answer was to order doctors to distribute literature to their prescribees containing long lists of fine print that they are free to ignore. In the name of sexual freedom, the U.S. government stood between a woman and her doctor.
To commemorate the liberation of women, Planned Parenthood sent out a press release declaring May 9 the 50th Anniversary of The Pill, and the American media joined the celebration in lockstep. Now technically, the FDA only announced that it had plans to approve The Pill on May 9, 1960. But shucks, this year, May 9 fell on a Sunday, and it was Mothers’ Day.
This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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To admin: last paragraph is a partial repeat of the previous one.
All of this is very true: What will the effects on humankind after generations of women have used this powerful drug on their bodies. I have heard that these artificial hormones have caused a lot of genetic damage already.
Someone has pointed out, perhaps on one of the threads of this forum or perhaps from Mars Hill, that liberalism as emerged from the Enlightenment would have likely died out or have been relegated to the back files of thought had it not been for the commensurate "advances" in technology. The pill made possible this fifty-year experiment in emancipating women from their created purpose and in bringing about the "equality" of the genders, equality being that false goddess which never satisfies, since in the natural order of things there is no such thing as equality.
And to think that many of these childless career women scorned China's compulsory one-child policy.
Mr. Wolf,
This is an excellent essay like so many other of your compositions.I always read your work and can never remember reading one that I didn't learn something from while being delighted.
I have only one minor objection which is the reference to "a team led by Dr. John Rock, a Roman Catholic fertility expert who publicly rejected Church teaching on contraception." This is an oxymoron. One cannot be a Roman Catholic fertility expert who...." One can be a baptized Roman Catholic, a practicing Catholic, an apostate Catholic, a heretic, a heterodox Roman Catholic, a dissenter, a damned nuisance in material or formal schism, or a baptized Catholic confusing progress in the Faith with the progressive faith which surrounds us.
There was never a time in the history of our Holy Religion when one could believe in the Trinity but not the immortality of the soul, or believe in the Incarnation and jettison the Annunciation. The cantankerous English historian who said "The Faith is a thing and not a theory" was correct to insist upon this point. From the very beginning there was a Christian community composed of saints and sinners (mostly sinners) but it was always "The Thing" which taught them what they were and not themselves making the standard up as they went along. Revelation ended upon the death of the last Apostle. John Henry Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine is a defense of this fact and not the application of Darwin's theory of evolution to revelation that so many modernists would have prefered.
I read recently where American catholics make up 6% of the world's Roman Catholic population and account for 80% of the documents of nullity granted on Christian marriage. Perhaps in reality they only make up 4% of the world's Catholic population? I once knew a wise poet and professor who converted from the Anglican profession to the Roman Catholic Church and obtained such a document once but never believed it was worth the paper it was written on. When his first wife predeceased him and he was notified of her passing, he hung his head in sadness and said, "Well, I guess I finally got my annulment."
As I have said a hundred times before, I always prefer the Catholic dressed in sinners clothing to the dissenter dressed in Catholic clothes. The one poor miserable wretch knows what he is and what he needs, the other never will. And afterall, faith is a kind of knowledge for those who know they need a physician, not for physicians with no need for the faith!!
The way of and to sanctification which we call the Beatitudes begins with "blessed are the poor in spirit," i.e. those who like the Prophet Isaiah come face to face with the Living God and say, "Woe is me, for I am undone; a man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips." Thereupon does the God of Mercy act and send His angel with the hot coals to spiritual cauterize the lips. There and only there does the long walk of sanctification begin, taking up our cross, daily, and following the Christ. One notes that this walk and the Beatitudes which outline it end with the honor and blessing of being persecuted for His name's sake.
To put it in the vernacular: it ain't no life for sissies; it is a hard civics course preparing us to be citizens of the Kingdom of God, to be on earth as it already is in heaven.