The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (30 page)

Not many Americans received heroes’ welcomes in Japan in the 1950s, but Sanger did.

Only ten years earlier, American bombers had reduced nearly half of Yokohama to rubble and killed more than seven thousand people in a single morning of incendiary air raids. Tokyo had been devastated during World War II, which claimed some two million Japanese soldiers and as many as one million civilians (compared to about four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers and
two thousand U.S. civilians
). When Japan surrendered, the United States and its allies took complete control of the country. Under the messianic leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, the country was remade. A new constitution stripped power from the emperor and gave it to the people. Business conglomerates were broken up and the economy based on a free-market capitalist system. The Americans were like Christian missionaries bringing their way of life to the pagans, as the historian John W. Dower wrote in
Embracing Defeat
: “The occupation of Japan was the
last immodest exercise
in the colonial conceit known as ‘the white man’s burden.’ ” Instead of rebelling, the Japanese, exhausted and diminished by war, embraced the chance to start over. Defeat had been devastating, but rejuvenation was an extraordinary opportunity that the Japanese pursued energetically. Citizens spoke out in community meetings. Bureaucrats pushed for serious reforms. New celebrities shot to fame. New religions sprang to life. The country was in chaos, but it was a thrilling kind of chaos, and when Margaret Sanger arrived in 1955, she was seen among the Japanese as the greatest kind of American hero, perhaps because her story paralleled their own in certain ways. She had fought the American government. She had suffered because of the American government. But she had stood up for her beliefs even as she put her faith in the system, trusting that democracy and free speech would let her message be heard. Even the losers got a chance in democracy.

It helped, too, that Sanger had visited Japan several times before the war and expressed her admiration for the culture and its people. On her first visit, in 1922, she became a media sensation, followed by reporters and photographers everywhere she went, her words and ideas carried in hundreds of published articles. She had been young and energetic then, and she had offered Japanese women hope for a better future. Throughout much of Japanese history, women had been regarded as the property of their fathers and husbands. They were subordinates—
courtesans, prostitutes, military pawns
, and servant-wives. Women trying to control their fertility were forced to rely primarily on abortion, which they justified by saying that they were returning their unborn children to the gods. By 1922, Japanese prostitutes were still advertised as if they were dinner entrees, with prices printed on cardboard menus, including rates by the hour or night, and girls as young as ten still worked
thirteen-hour shifts
in silk-spinning factories. But attitudes began to change in the 1920s, which is why Sanger was not only welcomed but cheered. Government grew more permissive and reform movements took hold. Overpopulation emerged as a social issue, too.

Japan was one of the most densely populated places on earth. Already, the country couldn’t grow enough rice to feed its people and was forced to rely on imports. Though her speeches were heavily censored, Sanger gave more than a dozen lectures and met hundreds of women. She became a symbol of strength and independence that would inspire Japanese women for years to come.

She inspired local activists to begin speaking out, including Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto, who said that Sanger had appeared “like a comet” and left “a
vivid and long-enduring impression
.” Ishimoto would go on to model her own career on that of Sanger’s, arguing that birth control was the tool women would use to build independent lives. Contraception gained wider acceptance in the years after Sanger’s first visit. Planned Parenthood pamphlets were translated into Japanese and distributed by doctors and Buddhist ministers. Companies making contraceptive devices used Sanger’s name and photograph (without permission) in their advertisements, and some even named their products after her. There were “Sangerm” spermicidal suppositories and “Sangai” diaphragm-and-jelly kits. Of greatest concern to the crusading feminist was an
illegal abortion-inducing medicine
simply called “Sanger” that was falsely advertised as having been “improved” by Margaret Sanger herself.

Sanger loved Japan, not only because the people there treated her like an idol but also, she said, because she saw “none of the ranting bitterness” that she encountered in her own country, “
no priests denouncing me
as an advocate of unbridled sex lust, no celibate clergy assailing me as the arch-apostle of immorality.”

The new constitution in Japan had given women the right to vote and organize labor unions. Sanger’s protégé, Ishimoto (now remarried and known as Shidzue Kato) won election to the Japanese Diet in 1946. But even as women were gaining more rights and power,
abortion rates in the country rose sharply
because of high unemployment rates and housing shortages. The number of reported abortions increased from about 246,000 in 1949 to about 806,000 in 1952, and the number of sterilization operations
would jump from 6,000
in 1949 to more than 44,000 in 1956.

Sanger, who opposed abortion as a method of birth control, believed that Japan needed an oral contraceptive more desperately than most nations. She also believed the country was well positioned to take advantage of innovations in contraception. Literacy rates were high. Midwives were active even in remote villages. Word of the new method would spread quickly. If it worked in Japan, Sanger strongly hoped it might work all over Asia and all over the world. Women would gain control of their bodies, gain control of family size, gain control of government. Before long there would be no more war. Independent women would lead the world through an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. That was the dream, anyway. But it wouldn’t happen with IUDs or condoms. Only Pincus’s new and improved product would do the job.

By the time of her arrival, Sanger had already made Japan aware of birth control’s urgency. Her goal for this visit was to announce to the world that a birth-control pill was close at hand and to get scientists in Japan and other countries to begin spreading the news and participating in clinical trials. If large-scale trials in Puerto Rico failed, Sanger hoped that Japan, where she seemed to have the golden touch, might be another option.

Ten days before Pincus’s scheduled speech, she began teasing reporters: When the conference opened, she said, an American scientist would announce that he had nearly perfected an inexpensive, all natural, oral contraceptive that could be eaten like candy. Within a year the drug would be available all over the world, she said in a remark that qualified either as wishful thinking or willful misinformation. “Within a year it will be cheap enough so it can reach the very poorest of people,” she told reporters. “The pill
will eliminate contraceptive devices
.”

As great as this candy-like contraceptive would be, she boasted, Dr. Pincus had something even better in the works: a single injection that would provide a woman with six months of protection from pregnancy.

Now Sanger was getting carried away. Pincus had discussed the possibility of such a contraceptive with his colleagues, but he wasn’t working on it.

It didn’t matter, though. Japan awaited Pincus’s arrival, and the world stood by to hear the details of the pill, which Sanger referred to in one statement as “
the miracle tablet maybe
.”

Lizzie and Goody Pincus arrived in Japan on October 15, two weeks after Sanger, and spent most of the week leading up to the conference as tourists. In crisp autumn weather they traveled with other scientists and their wives to see the Kegon Falls, the Chugenji Temple, and the trout hatchery at the Senjogohara Plateau, where Lizzie, cigarette jammed between white-gloved fingers, lectured her Japanese hosts on how best to cook the fish. The Pincuses ate tempura and received lessons in how to use chopsticks, but when geisha girls offered sake, Goody declined. Though normally fond of a strong drink,
he complained of stomach trouble
and asked for milk instead.

In the days before his big speech, while Lizzie shopped, Goody visited universities and lectured graduate students. They stayed at the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Imperial Hotel, one of the few structures in the city to survive both the earthquake of 1923 and the American firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945.

The conference began at 9 a.m. on Monday, October 24. Four hundred men and women—including dozens of foreign scientists—crowded the auditorium of the Masonic Building in central Tokyo. A great wave of applause greeted Sanger as she stepped to the podium in flat shoes, looking like an elderly churchwoman with a dowdy sweater over a dark blouse and skirt. A pillbox hat sat lightly atop her wavy, gray hair. A translator stood by her side.

As she gazed out at the crowd, Sanger smiled and said
she felt as if she were at home
in Japan. As much as she loved the country and its people, though, she said it was clear as she walked the streets of Tokyo in recent days that the place was growing too crowded. The problem was not Japan’s alone. It was a global one, and solving it would require more than education. It would require more than teaching women to be more assertive and teaching men to control their libidos. That is why she had come to Japan yet again, to suggest a better way.

“This conference is bigger than the previous ones,” she said. “This is going to be a landmark event for family planning because we are going to talk about birth-control research, which we were not ready to
talk about in the previous conferences
.”

Pincus’s remarks were scheduled for the afternoon of October 28, the fifth and penultimate day of the conference. In addition to the press that would be covering the speech and the birth-control advocates who would be there to help spread the news, some of the world’s leading experts in reproductive biology would be in attendance, including the zoologist Solly Zuckerman, who would be knighted in 1956 for his service to England during the war, when he studied the human and economic effects of bombing raids and helped the Royal Air Force choose its targets in the buildup to D-Day. Zuckerman was one of the great polymaths of his time, a friend to George and Ira Gershwin and an expert on the social life of monkeys and apes. Also on hand was Dr. Alan Sterling Parkes, one of England’s pioneers in hormone research and already a legend in his field. Like Zuckerman, he would soon be knighted for his contributions to science. The day before Pincus’s scheduled remarks, the eminent Dr. Parkes expressed low expectations when he presented a review of various birth-control research projects underway around the world and said that, in his opinion, they offered “little or no hope of early development towards practical application.” In theory, Dr. Parkes said, it was possible that a safe compound might be discovered that would prevent the pituitary gland’s hormones from reaching their target in the ovaries, but only in theory. “I need hardly say,” he continued, “that
no such substance is yet known
.”

Hours before Pincus was to make his speech, M. C. Chang presented one of his own. Though he remained Pincus’s close associate, Chang thought it was too soon for his boss to declare victory in the search for a birth-control pill. Like Rock, Chang wanted more
time to prove it really worked
. He also had a broader concern that a daily pill to inhibit ovulation might be the wrong approach. Even if the price of the pill came down dramatically, he wondered if it would ever be cheap and convenient enough to prove effective for women in the poorest communities. He had a nagging feeling that by creating a pill that required swallowing twenty-one doses a month, drug companies would be the biggest winners. They’d have women hooked for years on their daily pills. Pincus tried to allay his fears. Drug company profits, he said,
were a “necessary evil.”
The pill might not be perfect, but it would do powerful work.