Saturday's Product: The Pill

The Pill is a safe sex tool that is universally known nowadays. Birth control pills work by releasing hormones in the body of the woman taking them to control periods and prevent eggs from being fertilised or even released. Although nowadays, most woman in the west take birth control as a matter of course, when the Pill was first conceived and introduced, it brought with it a wave of social revolution and a complexity of issues that are ongoing today.

The Pill uses the hormone progesterone to block the egg from dropping and from being able to be fertilised. Surprisingly, the pill started out as a way to help infertility, not create a falsely infertile woman. The theory was that if you don’t allow any eggs to drop for a while and then let it drop several months later, it would be more easily fertilised and thus infertile woman would be able to get pregnant. Although it’s likely that the women who got pregnant after dropping the pill after four months was a fluke, it did lead researchers, specifically Gregory Pincus who had conducted the research into improving infertility, to strengthening the pill as a contraceptive and begin a slow release into the public once it was deemed safe and effective.

What’s interesting about the Pill is the time it took to take the world by storm. Christianity for example was taken rather off guard by its introduction and implications; for a while the Pill was accepted because it didn’t damage a fetus or embryo, it just lengthened the period of safe sex time that happened in a woman’s natural cycle and since most church leaders encouraged Natural Family Planning (that is, having sex during a woman’s ‘safe’ period in order to prevent pregnancy), there wasn’t much any church could say against the pill for a while. In fact, it wasn’t until the woman’s movement began to snowball, thanks in no small part to the arrival and widespread use of The Pill that churches such as the Catholic Church began to take a more active and negative interest in the contraceptive. By that point though, it was hard to get women to stop taking it; many Catholic women were on the Pill to prevent unwanted pregnancies already, so most Catholic leaders adopted an ‘if we don’t know about it, we can’t get you for it’ policy. Leaders were still were very outspoken against contraceptives though, believing that they encouraged loose morals and promiscuity.

On a wider social scale though, the Pill had far more reaching consequences than the inventors could have imagined. Freed from the worry of childbearing, the age of marriage and child birth began to rise while more career women entered the workforce. Although most women would point out that this was through the efforts of campaign and protest, the Pill certainly had a role to play. Employers were more willing to hire a woman who wouldn’t be on maternity leave every two years and schools were more willing to open their doors to women who would complete a degree rather than getting pregnant and dropping out. Women were taking greater control of their sexuality; they were able to take the Pill without their husband’s knowledge or consent and thus this gave them a feeling of empowerment. And of course, it gave the rights to pregnancy more heavily to the woman; if she didn’t want to have a baby, she just had to pop a pill daily and the odds of getting pregnant dropped dramatically. And many mothers would slip their daughters the Pill once she reached the age of dating for fear of pregnancy.

The Pill had a massive impact on the woman’s movement and some historians believe that the woman’s movement would not have gone as far so quickly if it hadn’t been for birth control. After all, it allowed more women to join the workforce, get educated and control their sexuality in a way that they never could before. But to heap all of the woes of promiscuity and non-consequences of sex onto the Pill is erroneous. After all, couples have been searching for ways to prevent birth for as long as they realised how babies were made! The Pill’s main impact was that it allowed women to control their sexuality in a clean, discreet and highly effective way.

Nowadays, the Pill is something of a rite of passage for most women-as soon as a girl starts thinking about sex and getting into a serious relationship, she’s put on the pill or another form of birth control. However, there is still a lot of controversy and misunderstandings surrounding The Pill and there likely always will be. Still, it’s very important for most women to know that they are literally taking the right to have children into their own hands instead of leaving it up their partner.

The writer would like to thank Time Magazine’s Article: 50th Anniversary of The Pill for all of the wonderful research material and facts. That article was written by Nancy Gibbs. Any incorrect facts in this article are not her fault, but my own. Thank you!