“Maybe it’s the nature of icons to be both worshipped and stoned, laden with symbolic value beyond their proportions” wrote Executive Editor Nancy Gibbs.
Which icon?
The Pill.
“Because the Pill arrived at a moment of epochal social change, it became a handy explanation for the inexplicable” she writes. This reminds me how many other legends developed in times of upheaval, like Babe Ruth and Sea Biscuit, and Don Bradman and Phar Lap.
However, the Pill had more than culturally symbolic.
The typical American woman go from having 3.6 children in 1960 to less than two by 1980.
There is a straight line between the Pill and the changes in family structure we now see,” says National Organization for Women (NOW) president Terry O’Neill, “with 22% of women earning more than their husbands. In 1970, 70% of women with children under 6 were at home; 30% worked. Now that’s roughly reversed.”
50 years after the FDA gave approval for the birth control pill, Time magazine released an abridged version Gibbs e-book, “Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill: A Brief History of Birth Control“.
The pill “was blamed for unleashing the sexual revolution among suddenly swinging singles, despite the fact that throughout the 1960s, women usually had to be married to get it,” she said.
Gibbs reminds us of the conflicts between women’s advocates and religious groups.But has much really changed as fights over insurance coverage, sex education and access to emergency contraception continue.
“As the conversation of the past half-century makes plain, science alone will not resolve questions that reach this deep into our relations with one another” she said.
It is ironic that the first medicine for people women who are not sick it was invented by a conservative Catholic hoping to find a cure for infertility.
In 1999 the Economist named it the most important scientific advance of the 20th century, but Gloria Steinem, one of the era’s most influential feminists, calls its impact “overrated” wrote Gibbs.
While a British study of 46,000 women over a 40 year period found women who took the pill lived longer but could not explain why, there are those who are concerned about health risks
The Pill is certainly a healthier alternative to the ancient Egyptian vaginal insert of crocodile dung, and more effective than a spermicidal of cedar oil and frankincense oil proposed by Aristotle.
Modern condom breakage is a minor inconvenience compared to sheaths of sheep intestines used by Charles II of England.
However, before you blame the pill for declining birth numbers consider the facts presented by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin.
“The Pill was not at all what separated reproduction and sex among married people,” she said. Women already practiced contraception. The typical white American woman in 1800 gave birth seven times; by 1900 the average was down to 3.5.
However, sex was viewed immoral unless a baby was intended for Protestants, Catholics, Western and Eastern Orthodox
Because fear of pregnancy was a powerful check on promiscuity information about contraception was treated as a form of pornography. For example, the US3 Congress passed a law banning birth control information as obscene in 1873.
