Fifty years of the Pill:
How it freed women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy, but also
brought dangers
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1273317/Fifty-years-Pill-One-womans-personal-memoir-Pills-dangers-medical-moral.html
By Jenni Murray
6th May 2010
October 1968 and an 18-year-old student is beginning to settle into
her first term at university.
It's her first taste of freedom away from the watchful eyes of strict
parents and grandparents.
The sexual revolution - that heady period that to her contemporaries
had meant 'nice girls did, if they felt like it' - had been far from
an option for the only daughter in a family where nice girls
absolutely didn't. Now was her chance.
She, of course, was me.
Swinging was the way the Sixties is remembered, and it may well have
been OK to tune in, turn on and drop out in a flower power frock if
you lived in London and frequented Carnaby Street, but for most of us
in the provinces it was a hard slog to get GCEs and A-levels and
perhaps be the first in your family to get to university.
Becoming an unmarried mother was an unforgivable sin. One girl in my
class made the mistake, was expelled from school and rejected by her
parents. Most girls were sent away and their babies adopted.
My generation was only too aware that pregnancy was an absolute
no-no. It would bring our ambitions to a halt, and in my case give my
mother such an apoplectic fit she might never allow me to darken her
door again - a threat she had made on many an occasion. 'Don't you
bring disgrace to this house, my girl,' still rang in my ears.
But sex was another matter. We knew, naturally, about the recently
available 'Pill' - a mythic medication, known not by its brand name
but by the broadest generic nomenclature ever applied to any product
- just The Pill.
It was officially approved in the U.S. on May 9, 1960, 50 years ago this week.
Within three years, 2.3million American females were taking it and
usage quickly spread throughout the Western world. Today it's taken
by more than 100million women.
The invention of the Pill coincided with a cataclysmic turning point
in British culture. Even for those a considerable distance from
Swinging London, the sense of revolution filtered down.
Gone were the twinsets, pearls and stiletto heels our mothers wore.
We yearned for mini skirts and Cuban heels. We fought our mothers'
insistence on nice perms and wore our hair long, straight and in
'curtains' on either side of my head - as my mother described it.
Tommy Steele and Buddy Holly discs were relegated to the bottom of
the pile and we saved for weeks to afford the 6s 9d it cost to buy
the latest single from The Beatles or Rolling Stones. (My mother
almost died when she heard Let's Spend The Night Together.)
And, for the first time, significant numbers of girls, influenced by
the quality of education and the burgeoning Women's Movement, planned
to leave home and plan a career.
The young women of the late Sixties heard the Pill discussed in the
news and read about it in magazines and newspapers.
But officially it was not for us. It came to the UK in 1961, but, as
in the U.S., was available only to married women on prescription.
Plus, it cost two shillings a month - a huge amount on a grant of £400 a year.
Nevertheless, as young followers of Women's Lib we wanted to be free
to make our own choices about sex and we wanted to be in control -
independent of a man.
No method of contraception was as effective as the Pill - (more than
99 per cent effective when taken correctly). So yes, young women
wanted it, but how were we to get it?
Lady Helen Brook, who worked for the Family Planning Association
(FPA), was the first to argue that contraception should be available
to women who were not married.
Brook began her work in the field in the Fifties, when research
showed a rise in premarital sexual activity. By 1960 the average age
of first intercourse had fallen from 21 to 19. It's now 15, according
to research carried out in 2000 for a Channel 4.
In subsequent interviews with me, Brook recalled how, in the Fifties,
more than 250,000 unmarried women were having unprotected sex every year.
'They were often,' she said, 'secretaries in their 30s and 40s and
men in those days often used their secretaries as mistresses, but
these women had no means of getting hold of birth control advice.
'They were dying at the hands of back-street abortionists.'
The constitution of the FPA would not allow her to invite unmarried
women for help, but in 1964, two years after the death of British
birth control campaigner Marie Stopes, Lady Brook opened her own
London clinic - the Brook Advisory Service - to do just that.
However, for women outside the capital, subterfuge was still
necessary to obtain the Pill.
In 1968 there was no Brook Clinic in Hull, where I was facing the
do-I-or-don't-I dilemma, but Woolworths did a good line in cheap wedding rings.
A number of us bought one and turned up at the local FPA as 'married'
women. Others bought a fake engagement ring and lied about an
upcoming wedding.
It was dishonest, but it worked. I don't recall any of us being
excessively promiscuous.
The benefits of that time were that the sexual revolution had given
us the right to say yes, the women's movement gave us the confidence
to say no, and the Pill made sure we never figured in the abortion or
unwanted baby statistics.
The development of the Pill came out of a curious mixture of
motivations and moral codes. The feminist-campaigner Margaret Sanger
was born in New York in 1879 to Roman Catholic parents, six years
after Congress had passed a law banning information about birth
control as obscene.
Her mother had died aged 50 after 18 pregnancies, and Sanger is said
to have confronted her father at the grave and accused him: 'You
caused this - Mother is dead from having too many children.'
Sanger trained as a nurse and became passionate about women's health
after witnessing the dire consequences of DIY abortions.
She endured arrest and imprisonment for her efforts to spread the
word about birth control - a term she invented in 1914.
In 1917 she met a multi-millionaire, Katharine Dexter McCormick, and
together they drove the birth control movement forward.
The Depression meant politicians became more open to the idea of
birth control, as limiting the size of a family became a matter of
life and death.
Eventually, the two women formed the Planned Parenthood Federation of
America, and by 1942 they had opened some 800 birth control clinics
across the U.S.
With McCormick's money and Sanger's enthusiasm they funded research,
begun in Mexico in 1951 by the chemist Carl Djerassi and the
professor of physiology, Gregory Pincus, to synthesise progesterone
from wild yams.
Pincus joined in the early Fifties with a Catholic doctor called John
Rock, who had been working with progesterone as a cure for
infertility. He believed that using the hormone to block ovulation
for a short period might kickstart the system, and he had carried out
trials to use progesterone for this purpose.
It was legal to attempt to aid conception in the U.S., but illegal to
test a product which would prevent conception, so trials to use the
system as a contraceptive were carried out in Puerto Rico.
The UK's version of Margaret Sanger came in the form of Marie Stopes,
whose books about equal partnership and birth control caused untold
scandal when they were published in 1918.
Like Sanger in the U.S., Stopes faced prosecution in this country for
the 'publication of obscenities', although the titles of her books -
Married Love and Wise Parenthood - scarcely sound offensive.
But questions of morality and safety have haunted the Pill ever since
its invention.
It was the first medicine to be taken regularly by people who were
not sick and from time to time there have been scares over possible
connections with thrombosis, breast and cervical cancer, then
reassurances, then more scares - and the numbers of women prepared to
take it have gone up and down several times.
Workers in the field anecdotally report that the birth rate
invariably rockets some nine months after reports of potential
dangerous side-effects of the Pill.
It was not until 1970 that pressure from the women's movement brought
about the Nelson Hearings in the U.S., forcing into the open
information about the possible side-effects or limitations of the
Pill. For a short while, worries about the Pill brought the diaphragm
back into popular use.
Despite such concerns, though, women continued to enjoy the
convenience of the Pill and for the most part followed those doctors
who advised it was less risky than pregnancy and childbirth. Latest
research by the FPA suggests that the Pill does not cause weight gain
or infertility.
It may induce headaches, nausea and mood changes for a short period,
which may necessitate a change in dose - refinements over the years
have brought lower and lower doses of the hormonal ingredients and
fewer side-effects.
It's now believed to have only a very rare role in the development of
blood clots and breast or cervical cancer.
The Pill really took off among young British women in 1974. The NHS
Reorganisation Act brought family planning into the NHS and provided
free contraception. In five years, the number of Pill users rose from
9 per cent to 36 per cent.
Access for young people was hotly debated after doctors were
empowered to prescribe it free. In 1980, Victoria Gillick, the mother
of five daughters, fought to stop doctors giving contraceptive advice
to girls under 16 without their parents' consent. She was defeated in
the House of Lords in 1985.
The Eighties, however, brought about a new health scare. Aids brought
home the fact that the Pill provided inadequate protection against
sexual infections.
One woman, young and adventurous at the time, told me: 'Aids made a
huge difference to my generation. It became uncool to sleep around.
Condoms are absolutely necessary if you're sleeping with someone and
not in a long-term relationship.'
So my generation was the lucky one. We were able to experiment in a
way no other has been able to do. I took various brands of mini-Pill
from the age of 18 until, at 31, I was settled with the man I wanted
to be the father of my children.
As far as I know, I suffered no long-term ill effects, although I had
an ectopic pregnancy which my gynaecologist put down to getting
pregnant too soon after long-term pill use.
My fallopian tube, he said, had been out of practice at pushing an
egg along, so it had embedded in the tube. I lost the tube and the
pregnancy, but happily gave birth to two sons who're now in their 20s.
Now, I suspect, the pill is in common use to prevent pregnancy, while
condoms are added to guard against sexually transmitted disease, at
least among those with the nous to protect themselves.
There is no doubt the ability to control our fertility so
successfully continues to influence the balance of power between men
and women, with more women working outside the home than ever before.
The backlash against the Pill from conservative forces across the
religious spectrum will, I'm sure, persist in its attempts to push
women back to the family values of the Fifties - but I doubt the
genie will ever go back into the bottle.
I also hope, however, that those women who want to have children
won't fall into the false sense of security created by the Pill and
the infertility industry.
No one should leave it too late. The Pill is very effective in
preventing conception, but IVF doesn't always work.
.
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