The Pill, John Rock, and the Church:
Deedy, John
The pill & the pew THE PILL. JOHN ROCK, AND THE CHURCH Loretta McLaughlin Little, Brown, $15.95, 243 pp. John Deedy AT A TIME when the contraceptive pill is as much a part of Catholic women's...
...and when success was achieved and one woman's egg was at last fertilized, it was carelessly lost by a laboratory aide...
...When the pope's own Lenten preacher was displaying an open mind about the pill, it would have been impossible to pillory the man in the pew who had discovered it...
...She wanted to share a moral dilemma...
...Gregory Pincus, Rock's principal collaborator...
...But large contention there was, and not just from Catholics...
...Earlier what protected Rock, or more specifically his research, was the notion that a pill to control pregnancy was outlandish, beyond the grasp of science...
...Among the astonishing details in that chain of events is that the pill was primarily developed by a man who was born Catholic and who remains devout into his ninety-second year, and secondly that this ultimate contraceptive technology originated in Massachusetts, a state which at the time held it a crime to exhibit, sell, prescribe, or provide contraceptives, or even to disseminate birth-control information...
...After all, it was just a little thing...
...Certainly he indulged in procedures which not only would not be tolerated today, but which Rock himself - sensitized by new appreciations of female personhood and awesome advances in embryology - would likely repudiate...
...The experiments were in fact conducted there because to have attempted to carry them out in Massachusetts would have been to chance criminal prosecution...
...I took the woman's dilemma to John Wright, then Bishop of Worcester, who exclaimed, "For God's sake, tell her to stick to typing...
...The prophet repudiated read the future with astonishing accuracy.ith astonishing accuracy...
...Also protecting him was his reputation as a specialist in fertility, and in fact his pill research did begin as a quest for the key to fertility for women who could not conceive...
...McLaughlin recounts the pressures placed on Rock, from the most sophisticated, eventually involving Harvard itself, to the most petty, including efforts to have him excommunicated for among other things being so bold as to receive communion Sundays at Immaculate Conception, his parish church...
...McLaughlin's objective, at which she peter CLECAK teaches social thought and comparative culture and serves as associate dean of graduate studies and research at the University of California at Irvine...
...nonetheless suceeds, is to portray Rock as both humanitarian and moralist, whose medical breakthrough not only provided the world with a feasible means at last of bringing population problems under control, but also the church with a method for family planning which squared with Catholic morality...
...You've gone and got the whole Vatican pregnant...
...They already have lost the fight on birth control, and now they will lose the fight on sterilization and abortion...
...Admittedly by the time Cushing jested with Rock some of the heat was off those on the other side of the issue...
...Boston's Archbishop Richard Cushing, however, never acted against him...
...McLaughlin's book deals with the scientific aspects of the pill's development and their ecclesiastical ramifications, and is more informative on the latter simply because this is an area that has not been mined before in the author's context, certainly not in the same depth...
...Inevitably the drug companies became "realistic," the pill took its place alongside the aspirin in the medicine cabinet, and most of the scare rumors which accompanied the pill's development (e.g., that it would postpone menopause, making women fertile into their sixties) proved to be exaggerated - although doctors do warn of side-effects, particularly among women who smoke while on the pill...
...Nor, she writes, was he unaware that if Rock succeeded in changing the church's position on birth control - a possibility thought to be bolstered by Rock's book The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor's Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control (Knopf, 1963) - some of the credit would accrue to Cushing himself...
...His books include Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left and, the newly-published America's Quest for the Ideal Self (Oxford University Press...
...That's understandable," excused Rock...
...She told of research under way at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in nearby Shrewsbury, where Pincus was based, which involved development of a birth-control pill and field experiments with women in Puerto Rico...
...His intention was first to save the family and, after that, the family of humankind...
...Similarly so when cardinals, theologians, and at least one national hierarchy were straightforwardly favoring the pill as moral...
...The risks were too great, especially the social risks...
...The primary developer was, of course, Dr...
...Even the medical and pharmaceutical communities were dubious, and planned parenthood groups were far more hopeful about the prospects of the intrauterine device...
...In 1956 or 1957, when I was editor of the diocesan newspaper in Worcester, Mass., I was approached by a young woman who worked for Dr...
...McLaughlin does not include the story in her book, but it belongs there if only for the clue it provides to the attitude at Boston Chancery's top level...
...John Deedy AT A TIME when the contraceptive pill is as much a part of Catholic women's regimen as orange juice, and when much of the clergy seems more bemused than persuaded by Humanae Vitae, the 1968 birth-control encyclical, it is difficult to imagine the contention generated less than twenty-five years ago by the scientific discovery than a synthetic progresterone could be produced which would block ovulation, allowing a woman to go the number of per pregnancies...
...The hierarchy has made another terrible mistake," Rock said in reflecting on the news...
...Let the man play...
...This is to be regretted...
...Here, for instance, women slated for hysterectomies were used as unwitting egg donors...
...An experience of my own accents how general was disbelief then that a contraceptive pill was within the reach of anyone...
...Inevitably in pioneering in so morally sensitive an area as human reproduction, many of Rock's tactics are open to critical judgment, not only in work developing the pill, but in earlier experimentation in test-tube conception...
...Instead he discovered a contraceptive...
...The birth-control pill was the abortion issue of its day, and was so widely regarded as socially immoral and medically questionable that even drug companies, which stood to make large fortunes in its manufacture, hung back wanting no part of any compound that interfered with the menstrual cycle...
...John Rock, and this is his story, effectively told by Loretta McLaughlin, medical writer for the Boston Globe and former science writer for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University...
...young interns offered their sperm (Rock paid them a small fee and provided a private cubicle decorated with nudes to help "inspire the young men to action...
...Indeed there is the wonderful story told by Rock's journalist nephew, Jerrold Rock Hickey, of Cushing greeting Rock during the Council years with the affectionate comment: "Johnny boy, Johnny boy, what have you done...
...The world accepted the pill, but the church served up Humanae Vitae...
...Ironically Wright was to become one of the severest critics of the pill and one of the staunchest de-fenders of Humanae Vitae...
...McLaughlin contends that Cushing was not insensitive to what Rock was trying to accomplish...
...NICHOLAS CLIFFORD, chairman of the history department at Middlebury College in Vermont, is the author of Retreat from China: British Policy in the Far East...
...Part of that theorizing may be unfair to Cushing, who was not a particularly calculating person...
...JOHN DEEDY is a former managing editor of Commonweal His books include Literary Places: A Guided Pilgrimage, Seven American Catholics, Daniel Berrigan, An Interim Biography, and The New Nuns: Serving Where the Spirit Moves (Fides/ Claretian...
...But there is little doubt that Cushing was alert - although how early is another question - to what Rock was up to, and he did not judge him for that...
...The book broaches some ethical problems, but more in passing than by way of serious scrutiny...
...Thus he let Rock be...
...Such incidents make possible the charge that Rock trifled with female privacy and dignity, as well as with life itself...
Vol. 110 • June 1983 • No. 12
