Promises the Pill Could Never Keep

Editorial By ELAINE TYLER MAY, New York Times

AN end to poverty. A cure for divorce. The elimination of unwed pregnancy. Fifty years ago next month, when the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would approve the oral contraceptive, these were the highest expectations for it. At the same time, few of its promoters in 1960 imagined how the pill, as it quickly became known, would become a powerful tool for transforming women’s lives.

In 1954, John Rock, the doctor who was leading the research on the pill, expressed the breathless excitement shared by many of his colleagues: An oral contraceptive, he said, “would be the greatest aid ever discovered to the happiness and security of individual families — indeed, to mankind” because “the greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy.”

At an international medical conference in Bombay a few years after F.D.A. approval, another doctor unfurled a rolled package of birth control pills into the packed auditorium and announced that the pill would solve India’s problems of hunger and poverty by leveling off its population. As it turned out, the pill had little effect on India’s or any other developing country’s population — because most women lacked access to medical clinics that could provide them with prescriptions and follow-up exams.

In the United States, some people claimed the pill would free married couples from fears of unwanted pregnancy, improving their sex lives and lowering the divorce rate. “With my wife on the pill, any moment is the right moment for love,” one euphoric husband said in 1969. “Unpremeditated sex is marvelous!”

Not every husband, though, found the pill quite so beneficial. Dr. Robert W. Kistner, a doctor at Harvard who was an early advocate of the pill, wrote in Ladies’ Home Journal: “Many wives feel sexually liberated by birth-control pills. But some husbands feel enslaved. It’s as if their sense of maleness and self-esteem has been threatened.” Kistner warned that “if the wives assumed the dominant role in the sex act or became the least bit animalistic,” husbands might become impotent.

Whether men found the pill a boon for or a deterrent to their sex lives, the annual divorce rate more than doubled in the 1960s and ’70s from 9 of every 1,000 married women to 23.

Others predicted that the pill would prevent pregnancy among “naughty little girls,” Rock’s description of sexually active single women. But the pill did not prevent unwed pregnancy, which in 1980 increased to 18 percent of all births, from 5 percent in 1960. Until 1972, several states barred the prescribing of contraceptives to unmarried women, and even where it was legal, many women were afraid to ask their doctors for the pill. In any case, as late as 1972, three-fourths of sexually active young, single women rarely or never used any form of birth control, a national study showed.

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