ON THE PILL

...or that this quaint notion, far from being peculiar to Rome, used to be common currency among those who considered themselves Christians and Jews...

...Nor does she inquire into even the most elementary features of that family morality...

...For fifteen words, these are meaty enough, and true as far as they go...

...Roman Catholic] and handsome as a god,” gushed Sanger, “he can just get away with anything...

...It’s true that he was some kind of R.C., but he was eager to see the birth-control opponents in the Church—the “rhythm cultists,” as he called them—routed...

...This is all the more curious in a book that contains fascinating confirmation of just how different was the pre- Pill culture...

...But as an explanation of what was on the minds of those disturbed by the separation of sex and procreation and the resulting disruption of the balance between men and women, Watkins’s words are grotesquely inadequate...

...The lopsidedness that is the central defect of the book resides in the yoking together of a shallow treatment of a big subject—the sexual revolution— and the painstaking documentaClaudia Winkler is managing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...The author, a college junior, predicted, on the basis of over two hundred responses: First, that undoubtedly the number of girls who are not virgins at marriage will increase, but by too small a number to cause more than a ripple in our great ocean of sexual tradition...

...ON THE PILL The American Way of Birth Control By Claudia Winkler With On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins has labored and brought forth an intriguing artifact: an articulate study of a turning point in American mores, full of worthy material—yet so distorted by ideological myopia as to be more valuable as evidence of our social transformation than as an interpretation of it...

...In January 1961, Mademoiselle published the results of a questionnaire asking college girls what effect a reliable contraceptive Pill would have on campus life...

...But, if nothing else, the sheer ubiquity of the Pill’s use as a symbol for the dismantling of sexual taboos ought to be a tipoff: This invention had a hold over people’s minds...

...Somehow, we have left behind a mainstream understanding of “lovemaking” as a human activity intrinsically connected to courtship, marriage, and procreation— and moved into the realm of “having sex,” an activity aimed at self-fulfillment and about which no moral or relational assumptions whatever can be made...

...Nor would anyone quarrel with her insistence that the Pill was not the only cause of the sexual revolution...

...Watkins’s short book tells the story of the genesis of the Pill and its early reception by the public...

...Because the findings were tentative, women were left to weigh possible ill-effects against the superior reliability of the Pill as a contraceptive...

...In her introduction, Watkins applies the word “drama” to this late- 1960s debate over the safety of the Pill...

...Watkins makes much of the lack of survey data on contraceptive use before 1971, and she’s right that we don’t actually know how many single women took the Pill in the 1960s...

...Presumably, in other words, people can be torn...

...and he had other useful attributes: “Being a good R.C...

...and the first largescale field trials of the Pill, conducted among residents of housing projects in Puerto Rico, would be criticized by feminists a decade later for failing to demonstrate the drug’s long-term safety...

...By 1976, she reports, Catholic women were no less likely than others to take the Pill...

...Part of the problem is a startling one-sidedness...

...Watkins handles this large slice of social history strangely...

...It was immediately welcomed by women, doctors, and the mass media as a boon to married couples...

...On the Pill offers no clue to why anyone sought to hold onto old-fashioned sexual morality...

...To head the research effort, begun in 1953, Sanger recruited biologist Gregory Goodwin Pincus, who had a longstanding association with the drug company G.D...

...The experimental work on a hormone- based contraceptive in the mid- 1950s provides fodder for one of Watkins’s major themes: the evolution of standards of informed consent and product safety in medicine...

...She fails even to hint, just for starters, that for the Church, “family morality” is not an arbitrary setup that some pope happens to favor, but an arrangement ordained by God...

...For the most part, Watkins presents this as a quirk of the Roman Catholic hierarchy...

...The idea came from that tireless crusader for population control, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, while the suffragist Katherine McCormick dipped into her husband’s International Harvester fortune to provide the funds...

...Pincus in turn enlisted John Rock, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Harvard Medical School, to run the clinical trials...

...Most doctors remained enthusiastic, and the number of new prescriptions continued to rise, though the rate of increase slowed...

...Searle...

...She fastidiously distances herself from the many who, over the decades, have seen in the Pill the symbol of the sexual revolution (or “the so-called sexual revolution,” as she first puts it...

...Confidence in the miracles of science was giving way to what one researcher would call a “pollutionconscious, post-thalidomide sensibility, far different from the wonder-drug optimism of the 1950s...

...At the time, however, the federal government approved new products on the basis of efficacy, not safety...

...And her discussion of Humanae vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical that reaffirmed Rome’s opposition to artificial birth control, allots a single line to the reasons for the Church’s stand...

...Take the belief that having children outside marriage was “illegitimate...

...Those naive girls were wrong, of course, and our great ocean of sexual tradition has been roiled...

...But presumably it is possible for Catholics to use contraception and yet remain influenced by the reverence for life that is central to Catholic ethics...

...It made possible sex with next to no fear of pregnancy...

...Among the first human subjects used in tests of synthetic hormones were twelve psychotic women...

...It was only the following year that a catastrophe in Europe clouded the prevailing optimism about new drugs, when a spate of infant deformities were traced to the mothers’ ingestion of the sedative thalidomide early in pregnancy...

...It separated intercourse from birth control, sanitizing sex of any messy reminders that procreation was even an issue...

...Watkins is finely attuned to the nuances of progressive thought: Look to her for a meticulous differentiation of the consumerist and feminist roots of the informed-consent movement, or for a careful parsing of the “classist” strand in the pro-population-control views of one physician, a well-off mother of six who could afford a professional career...

...Watkins’s book shrinks from the most compelling dimension of its subject: the part played by the Pill in getting us here...

...It is in our time that this age-old assumption has been overthrown...

...But she can spare so potent a word for this purpose only because she fails to apply it where it properly belongs: to the sea change in sexual morality associated with her subject...

...The reason early surveys did not ask young single women about contraceptive use, Watkins says, is that for such women in the 1950s, premeditated sex was “unthinkable...

...And, most of all, it invited a new way of thinking about sex—starting with that defining 1960s idea “free love...

...This book fails to explore creatively— because it fails even to admit—the relation that plainly does exist between the arrival of a near-foolproof oral contraceptive and the new flourishing of uncommitted sex, with all its social consequences...

...While she notes the debate in major newspapers prompted by John Rock’s 1963 book The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle over Birth Control, she neglects to sketch his critics’ views...

...The pope, in other words, correctly perceived that “family morality” was under threat...

...Yet she is deaf to the rending of the cultural fabric that is the backdrop to modernity...

...Watkins devotes a chapter to the 1970 Senate hearings chaired by Gaylord Nelson that led to the Food and Drug Administration’s requiring a seven-sentence insert in Pill packages informing Pill users that they might suffer side effects and that their doctor could provide a longer information booklet...

...The agency gave the oral contraceptive a green light in 1960, and Searle brought it to the market under the name “Enovid...

...second, that the Pill will have no effect whatsoever on most women’s desire for sex with one man within a permanent love relationship...

...The first new contraceptive of modern times, and much the most reliable, the Pill was born at a time of optimism about scientific progress...

...In the years under review, the share of births in the United States to unmarried mothers rose from 4.0 percent to 10.7 percent, entering on the course that would bring it to 32.4 percent by 1997...

...Watkins discusses in considerable detail the emergence of research casting doubt on the Pill’s safety...

...Here is that line, Watkins’s whole account of why anyone ever had reservations about artificial birth control in general or the Pill in particular: “For the Pope and his bishops, family morality lay at the heart of the matter...

...In the mid-1960s, however, there emerged evidence of possible health risks, and Watkins—a Harvard-trained historian of science— recounts the inconclusive debates about the proper response to those risks...

...Carrying scholarly agnosticism to the extreme, she writes, “The Pill did indeed revolutionize birth control, and radical changes in sexual attitudes and conduct did take place, particularly among young people, but no one ever established a connection between these two phenomena...

...Watkins disposes of Catholic objections by noting that many lay Catholics used birth control...

...Rock lent the effort the prestige of Harvard...

...Not that the origin of the Pill makes for an uninteresting yarn...