The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (33 page)

Pincus and Rock had chosen Searle’s compound, norethynodrel, over Syntex’s norethindrone. They said it was because the Syntex compound produced slight increases in masculine traits among lab animals, but Carl Djerassi, the chemist who had developed norethindrone for Syntex, believed there was another reason: Pincus had long-standing business ties with Searle and owned shares of the company’s stock. They began with a dose of ten milligrams per pill, the same amount Rock had given his patients back in Boston. The women were told to begin taking the pills five days after the start of their next period. Then they were supposed to take one pill a day for twenty days before stopping. If they missed a day, they were supposed to take a double dose the following day. The instructions were complicated and this method of birth control completely unfamiliar to the participants, but Rice-Wray said the women were eager to begin. In fact, she told Pincus, they were “
crazy to get the pill
.”

As the tests began in San Juan, Pincus invited Rock to present a summary of the first round of human tests at the thirteenth annual Laurentian Hormone Conference in September 1956. A few months earlier, Rock had urged Pincus not to talk about their work in Japan. He had been afraid of backlash from the Catholic Church. Now, however, he was ready.

The biggest names in hormone research were there, and, inspired by Pincus’s leadership style, they were notoriously aggressive. Speakers were not expected merely to read their scientific papers and bask in a round of applause; they were expected to stand on stage for a grilling by their scientific peers. Rock’s paper, coauthored with Pincus and Dr. Celso-Ramón Garcia, was modestly titled “Synthetic Progestins in the Normal Human Menstrual Cycle.” Most of the paper was dull, even by scientific standards, but one subsection caught the attention of everyone in the room—the section describing the effects of progestins on the ovulation of fifty women tested at Rock’s clinics.

Rock approached this subject cautiously. Though the conferees knew that he and Pincus were on the brink of something potentially big, Rock refused to speculate. He showed slide after slide illustrating the effects of progestins on vaginal tissue and ovarian tissue. He explained in details the results of his patients’ urine analyses. The word “contraceptive” never escaped his lips. This was as sexy and provocative as the buttoned-up Rock allowed himself to get: “
We are led to suspect
,” he said, “that ovulation has been inhibited in at least a very high proportion of cases.”

Finally, he added that seven of his patients became pregnant after treatment. This was important for many reasons, not the least of which being that Rock’s patients in the study had come to him seeking help having children. But that wasn’t all. Rock also wanted the scientists to know that the progestins did no harm to the eggs or ovaries.

The scientists in the audience pressed him.

“It seems to me we have anti-ovulation!” a voice cried out.

Rock grinned but refused to take the bait.

“I didn’t say it, but I allowed them to know,”
he recalled years later
in an interview, that it was indeed the case. He wasn’t being modest and he wasn’t afraid of angering officials in the Church. In his mind, it was a matter of showing respect for his Church. “I think I was protecting Catholicism as such, rather than myself,” he said. “I had a loyalty to the Church, a loyalty which kind of transcends belief. The time was not yet right to flaunt the contraceptive effect.”

That did not stop the scientists from asking more questions. Dr. Edward T. Tyler, a gynecologist from Los Angeles, said he recently had been testing norethindrone on his patients with irregular menstrual cycles, but some of his data were different from Rock’s and Pincus’s. He wanted someone to explain and wasn’t getting answers.

“Dr. Pincus and I discussed this until 2 a.m. last night,” Dr. Tyler said. Pincus found consistent declines in pregnanediol—an inactive product formed from the breakdown of progesterone—while Tyler found no such decrease. “He finally came up with a solution that was so simple I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself. His explanation was simply that
my results were all wrong
.”

Despite some teasing about Pincus’s tendency to bully his peers and Rock’s reluctance to make a splash, the word was out now and both men knew it.

Rock, who always liked to unwind with a drink or two, decided to skip the conference dinner that night and go out with a few other doctors in search of what he called “
superior forms of entertainment
.” When they reached their second drinking establishment of the evening, Rock cut in on a young couple as they danced, leaving the young man to watch as he spun around the room with a much younger woman. When he returned to the gathering of scientists clustered at the bar, Rock presented a complete report on the couple’s troubled sex life. He said he had offered suggestions that, if followed, would surely “clear the whole thing up.”

Eventually, Rock and his party returned to the lodge at Mont Tremblant. While the other scientists continued to discuss the afternoon’s lectures on hormones, Rock and his inebriated crew stripped and
plunged nude into the swimming pool
.

TWENTY-FIVE

“Papa Pincus’s Pink Pills for Planned Parenthood”

“Y
OU MUST, INDEED,
feel a certain pride in your judgment,” Margaret Sanger wrote to Katharine McCormick in December 1956. “Gregory Pincus had been working for at least ten years. . . . He had practically no money for his work and . . . then you came along with your fine interest and enthusiasm and with your faith and . . .
things began to happen
.”

Sanger’s exuberance sprang from an article in the November 1956 issue of
Science
magazine, the first article on the pill intended for a mainstream audience.

“At last the reports . . . are now out,” Sanger wrote, “and
the conspiracy of silence is broken
.”

Their work was far from done, but Sanger and McCormick felt justified in celebrating. Given the ordinary pace of such experimentations, neither of them could have been confident that they would live to see Pincus’s work come to a successful conclusion. Now, they were tantalizingly close.

Sanger, however, continued to grow sicker and weaker. She was hooked on sleeping pills and painkillers, and in addition to champagne, she was drinking hard liquor, starting with
daiquiris in bed in the morning
. At a Population Council conference in New York, she nodded off during the long and repetitious remarks of the Indian ambassador to the United States. When dinner was served, the people sitting beside her tried to wake her but could not. A Planned Parenthood official carried her to her room and
put her to bed
.

Sanger complained in letters to friends and colleagues that she missed the good old days when the birth-control crusade was a “fighting, forward, no fooling movement, battling for the freedom of the poorest parents and for
woman’s biological freedom and development
.” She was still angry that the organization she founded had changed its name from the Birth Control Federation to “
that inane one Planned Parenthood
.” But now, at least, thanks in large part to McCormick and Pincus, she had one more fight, one more “no fooling movement” left to pursue.

Later generations would complain that the birth-control pill put the burden for contraception on women, but that’s not the way these women saw it. Sanger and McCormick were born in the nineteenth century. To them, an oral contraceptive wasn’t a burden for women. It was a tool. It was an opportunity. And it was on the verge of becoming something more: an achievement that would change women’s roles forever.

Pincus had the same feeling. There was no precedent for the development of a product like this one, but somehow he was certain he was going to make it work. His nephew, Geoff Dutton, remembered spending time at the Worcester Foundation and in his Uncle Goody’s home around 1956. When he was twelve years old, Geoff used to beg Goody to take him to the lab, where he would gaze into the animal cages and dig through the stock room in search of materials he could use to conduct experiments at home.

“Take whatever you want,” Uncle Goody would say, and the boy would fill boxes with test tubes, beakers, and bottles of chemicals. “He didn’t inspect it,” Geoff recalled. “He didn’t seem to care what I was taking.” One day at about that time, he said, a big box arrived in the mail. It was from Uncle Goody. “In it were bottles of sulfuric acid, nitric acid, a couple bottles of mercury . . . materials you could make explosives with,” Geoff said. “And I did make some.” While that was Dutton’s clearest memory from 1956, he also remembered his parents talking to his uncle about the oral contraceptive Pincus had in development. It was nearly complete, Geoff’s parents said, and
it was going to be big
.

Pincus had enough confidence in Searle’s progestin that he began offering it to friends and relatives and getting their informal reports on the drug. Peggy Blake of Morris Plains, New Jersey—whose connection to Pincus is unclear—wrote to him on July 28, 1956, to say she was not happy with the effects of the pill thus far:

Dear Dr. Pincus,

I have finally started taking SC-4642 (known in this household as Papa Pincus’s Pink Pills for Planned Parenthood) and would like to enquire [
sic
] about some possible side effects. The thing is, I have been taking them for 8 days, and during that time have had headaches and some nausea. Also possible slight edema. Do you think it could be the SC-4642? Or have I more likely got some bug or other? Could you let me know your opinion on this soon. I shall continue to take the pills
until I hear from you
.

Pincus wrote back saying that her description of the symptoms “
pretty much persuades me
that the effects you observed are due to the pill.” The same symptoms appeared in about 5 percent of all cases, he explained, but they often disappeared or at least diminished as women began their second month of use. “What you should do is, of course, up to you,” he wrote. “I don’t see much sense in making yourself unhappy.”

Peggy Blake did quit taking the pill, and just in time, to hear her tell it, because she had also begun to suffer serious psychological effects. “
I was ready to murder
anyone who momentarily got in my way, and to burst into tears on practically no provocation.” Whether this was directly a result of the pills or simply the anger she felt at suffering so many physical symptoms, she wasn’t sure. When she quit the pill after ten days, Blake went to see her doctor to make sure there was nothing wrong with her. “I shall forward you the bill,” she informed Pincus, “since, though I am glad to be an experimental subject for you, I don’t think I should
lose money on the deal
.”

Blake’s letter might have served as a warning, but Pincus was still not terribly worried. Side effects were called side effects for a reason: they were not the main concern. The priority was to make sure no one taking the pill got pregnant. There would be time enough to tinker with the dosages and even the chemical makeup of the pill to see if the side effects could be reduced or eliminated.