The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (16 page)

There is no mention of contraception in the Bible, Old Testament or New, nor did the term enter the vocabulary of Catholic moral theology until the second half of the twentieth century. Before then, the most relevant term used by theologians was
onanisma
, from the biblical story of Onan (Genesis 38:4–10), which was described as masturbation or sexual intercourse performed without the intention of reproduction. Sex was only for procreation, the Christian church declared, which made
onanisma
a sin.

The human reproductive system was poorly understood even in the early years of the twentieth century. Many people thought women were merely the vessels, and that it was the man’s seed that sprung on its own into a baby. That’s why spilling seed, or losing semen, whether in sex or masturbation, was labeled a sin. The philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote extensively and influentially on the subject in the thirteenth century, arguing that all sex without procreation, even within a marriage, amounted to lust. Still, the Catholic Church had no official position on birth control until 1930, when Pope Pius XI issued a papal encyclical called “Casti Connubii” (Latin for “Of Chaste Wedlock”). The pope acknowledged that birth control was widely used “even amongst the faithful,” although he wasn’t happy about it, and called this trend “a new and utterly perverse morality.” He added that it amounted to a “
shameful and intrinsically vicious
” attempt to get around the natural “power and purpose” of the conjugal act. The pope did, however, offer the faithful an important loophole: A married couple would not be sinning, he said, if for “natural reasons either of time or of certain defects, new life cannot be brought forth.” In other words, a married couple could have sex for pleasure so long as the husband and wife knew that natural reasons prevented them from having children.

For decades doctors had been instructing women who did not wish to become pregnant to have sex only during their “safe periods.” Unfortunately for many women, until the 1930s most doctors believed the safe period came in the middle of the menstrual cycle; in fact, that’s the time when women are most likely to conceive. After scientists finally got it right, a Chicago family doctor named Leo J. Latz, a devout Roman Catholic, figured out how this information, combined with the pope’s recent declaration, offered men and women a shot at having guilt-free and baby-free sex at certain times of the month.

Latz wrote a dryly worded book called
The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women
, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies. By avoiding intercourse for eight days each month—five days before ovulation and three days after—women could naturally and ethically control their bodies and regulate their family sizes, Latz instructed. It wasn’t foolproof, of course. Timing ovulation is tricky. Every woman’s body is different, and a woman can ovulate at a different time each month, depending on factors such as stress and illness. But Latz did his best to help. He told women to keep a detailed record for six months of the exact dates when their menstruation began and then count the days in between. Once they discerned a regular cycle, women could determine their infertile days based on research that showed ovulation occurred twelve to sixteen days before menstruation.

Despite the uncertainties, Latz’s message found a receptive audience, in part because he wrote with one clear assumption in mind: that married couples had a right to enjoy regular, fear-free sex simply for the pleasure it provided. God planned it that way.

But there was more than pleasure on the line. Women all over the world were desperate to control family size or better time the arrival of children—for the sake of their health and the welfare of their other children. Companies began producing graphs, wheels, calendars, and slide rules to help women accurately calculate their cycles. Despite the great impact of
The Rhythm
, however, it eventually cost Latz, who was fired from the medical faculty of Loyola University in Chicago, almost certainly because of
his controversial cause
.

In the 1930s, birth rates for all American families fell to a low of 2.1 children per mother, in large part because of the Great Depression. Catholic families remained larger than average, but even Catholic couples began having fewer children as women became increasingly comfortable with the rhythm method and other forms of birth control. “The trend of our Catholic population is toward extinction,” said Monsignor John A. Ryan in 1934. “Our people are showing that they have not the capacity, the courage and the endurance necessary to marry and bring into the world sufficiently large families to
ensure group survival
.” Many priests took to their pulpits to attack birth control and abortion, but their sermons did little good. Birth control was out in the open now. For the first time, many Catholics began compartmentalizing their beliefs. Sex was something private and apart from religion. They would obey the pope on
this
matter but not
that
one. It was the rumbling before a seismic shift.

Margaret Sanger should have been satisfied that birth control had driven a wedge between the Catholic Church and many of its followers. She should have been happy that so many Catholic women were coming around to her way of thinking. But the rhythm method wasn’t good enough for her. It was unreliable, which is why the joke was born: “What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method?
Mommy
.” It also did little to help a woman explore her sexual desires, since it required women to limit those desires to certain times of the month. Sanger still wanted doctors to dispense a reliable, low-cost form of birth control. And she did not want unmarried women to be excluded. Partial victories were not victories at all in her mind. Her Catholic critics complained that the rhythm method was superior to Sanger’s artificial contraceptives because it did not interfere with the natural process of life. But Sanger shot back that all sorts of things interfered with the natural process of life. Resisting sexual temptation interfered with the natural process of life. Every time the pope shaved his whiskers, she said, he interfered with the natural process of life.

Sanger’s mistrust of the Church had grown and calcified over time. So great was her distrust that she did not want Pincus to include Rock on the team investigating progesterone, arguing that “he would not dare advance the cause of contraceptive research and
remain a Catholic
.” Pincus defended Rock, saying that the doctor was a “
reformed Catholic
” whose medical views were distinct from his religious beliefs.

Sanger did not lose a lot of arguments, but she lost this one.

Pincus saw in Rock not only a talented scientist but also an important promoter of his new, as yet unrealized birth-control pill. Rock had already gained a small measure of fame as the Catholic doctor who dared defy his own church. In 1944, he made headlines when he and his assistant, a former Pincus lab worker, achieved the first successful
in vitro
fertilization of human ova. Rock neither bragged nor attempted to frighten, telling reporters it would take at least a decade before the technology would evolve enough to produce pregnancies for women. Unlike Pincus, the urbane, pipe-smoking, ascot-wearing Dr. Rock offered a reassuring presence. No one would have dared compare him to Dr. Frankenstein. Quite the contrary, newspaper and magazine readers looking at his picture and taking in his measured words couldn’t help but feel the future was in good hands. If John Rock said it would be safe, they concluded, it must be safe.

Even when Rock challenged the Catholic Church, he did so diplomatically, giving the impression that he was on the side of fairness and tolerance. He wasn’t trying to blow up the institution of marriage. He wasn’t trying to encourage sex for the sake of mere pleasure. He wasn’t trying to hurt the Church. He was encouraging Americans in general and Catholics in particular to be more thoughtful in how they approached marriage and the making of families. “
I don’t think that Roman Catholicism
forces a man to interfere with other people’s freedom of conscience and action within their own moral principles,” he told
Time
magazine in 1948. Soon after the publication of the
Time
article, Rock published a book called
Voluntary Parenthood
, which attracted more national attention, including an excerpt in
Coronet
magazine, a general-interest magazine that rivaled
Reader’s Digest
. “Nothing in the life of a man and woman is going to be as important to themselves or society as their parenthood,” Rock’s article began. “It seems reasonable, then, that prospective parents should apply at least as much intelligence and foresight to this as to designing a home, buying furniture, or choosing a career. Yet, when a modern couple embark upon the voyage of life together, they are launched on a sea of ignorance. . . . They have to find their own course, for the available charts are mostly a mixture of
superstition, science, and symbolism
.”

Rock, in his own way, made it his mission to improve the available charts. He wanted young couples to talk about sex and babies before they married. He wanted them to understand that sex was neither shameful nor obscene. He wanted society to provide safe and effective means of birth control, and he wanted married couples to have the right to use them. For all of this, Monsignor Francis W. Carney of Cleveland called Rock a “moral rapist,” and Frederick Good, the head of obstetrics at Boston City Hospital, asked Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing to have Rock excommunicated. But Rock would not budge. It was no wonder Pincus was drawn to him.

Gregory Pincus and John Rock first met in the 1930s, when Pincus was still at Harvard. In the 1940s, when Rock began experimenting with
in vitro
fertilization of human ova, one of his first steps was to send his research assistant to Pincus for guidance.

When Rock treated women for infertility, he would begin by taking a medical history and providing a complete physical exam. If the woman wasn’t menstruating, or if she wasn’t menstruating regularly, Rock would suspect an ovulation disorder and order an endometrial biopsy. Rock was unusual among fertility specialists at the time because he also asked husbands to have their semen tested. He suspected (and his suspicions would be confirmed in later years) that men were responsible for a large percentage of infertility problems. He was also unusual—if not unique—in that he operated a rhythm clinic down the hall from his infertility clinic.

Rock’s rhythm clinic was the first free clinic in Massachusetts to offer birth-control advice. After receiving physical exams, women visiting the rhythm clinic were asked to chart their menstrual cycles and sex lives for three months. After that, Rock tried to instruct the women who had regular cycles when they could safely have sex with little risk of conception. He knew that many of the women were using diaphragms, douches, and condoms, but the law would not allow him to prescribe or even discuss those items unless the woman’s health was in serious jeopardy. Even if Rock had been allowed to distribute birth-control devices, roughly 90 percent of his patients were Catholic and more interested in the rhythm method. Some of his patients had had more than a dozen children and wanted to stop getting pregnant. Others wanted to better space the arrivals of future children. Between the women seeking birth control and those patients who were trying to overcome infertility, Rock came to understand not only human reproduction but also a good deal about human relations. In the same day, he would see some women who were straining to raise more children than they could handle and others deeply wounded by their inability to get pregnant. They were housewives, mostly working-class women, married to bakers, laundry workers, elevator operators, and machinists. Among the women with children, many came asking for the only thing they’d ever heard of that would guarantee an end to their baby-making days: a hysterectomy, or the removal of the uterus.

One such patient, known as Mrs. L. A., was thirty-two years old. She had married when she was eighteen, borne eleven children, and had one miscarriage. Her last five deliveries had been by Cesarean section, and her very last had been twins. She told Rock she and her husband had sex twice a month and never used birth control. The twins were only six months old when Mrs. L. A. visited Rock. She reported that her husband was trying to be “careful,” meaning that he was withdrawing before he ejaculated, to avoid getting her pregnant again. When Mrs. L. A. arrived at Rock’s office, she was sent to the fertility clinic accidentally. Once that was straightened out, she told the doctor she was exhausted, in pain, and suffering occasional blackouts. Her periods were unusually profuse and painful, she said. Rock, concerned that the woman might have a tumor, suggested an immediate hysterectomy.