The FDA approves the world's first birth control pill - May 9th, 1960

On this day in 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first commercially produced birth control pill. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show for those who can never know enough about history.
I'm Gabeluesier, and today we're looking at the time when

(00:21):
a new contraceptive option was made available to American women,
one that, while not perfect, was far more reliable and
far less intrusive than anything else on the market. The
day was May ninth, nineteen sixty The US Food and

(00:43):
Drug Administration approved the first commercially produced birth control pill.
It was called enovid, and just one month after its approval,
the gd Searle Company of Chicago began selling it in
ten milligram doses. The main active in gredient was a
synthetic form of progesterone, a steroid hormone that occurs naturally

(01:05):
in the menstrual cycle of humans and other species. Unfortunately,
the approved dose of enovid was later determined to be
ten times too high, and as a result, some early
adopters experienced severe side effects, including life threatening blood clots.
Further refinements eventually led to lower dose versions of the pill,

(01:28):
which were far safer and more effective at preventing pregnancy,
development of The pill began at the behest of Margaret Sanger,
an American activist, writer, and nurse who had long campaigned
for a better method of birth control for American women.
In nineteen fifty, Sanger, then in her early seventies, met

(01:49):
with a biochemist named Gregory Pinkus at a Manhattan apartment.
She urged him to begin research into a reliable, safe,
and inexpensive alternative to traditional contraceptives like condoms and diaphragms.
Her vision was for a new women controlled form of
birth control, a pill as easy to take as an aspirin.

(02:11):
What Sanger asked of Pinkus that evening was a tall order,
not just in terms of the science, but also due
to the legal risk. At the time, more than half
the state still had criminal restrictions against selling or distributing contraceptives,
so developing an all new one in your private lab
likely would have been frowned upon as well. Nonetheless, Pincus

(02:34):
agreed to give it a shot and quickly developed a
research theory centered on the use of progesterone that natural
hormone plays an important role in maintaining the early stages
of pregnancy. But Pincus wondered what might happen if it
were introduced to the body prior to pregnancy. His belief
was that a woman's reproductive system would more or less

(02:55):
be fooled into thinking that she was pregnant already, and
would then respond by suppressing any further conception. Pinkus tested
his theory on rats and rabbits, but the success rate
of chemically produced progesterone wasn't quite as high as he
had expected. His search for a more potent form of
the hormone eventually led him to a synthetic variant derived

(03:17):
from a wild Mexican yam called Barbasco. Pinkus struck a
deal with a pharmaceutical company in Chicago, Searle that produced
the synthetic hormone, and in nineteen fifty four he and
colleague John Rock began running clinical tests of a pill
that used synthetic progesterone and estrogen to repress ovulation in women.

(03:40):
Much of the funding for this research was donated by
Catherine McCormick, a philanthropist and friend of Margaret Sanger, who
followed every stage of the project from conception to market,
though she rarely gets the credit she deserves. In nineteen
fifty seven, the FDA approved the use of n of
It not for birth control, but for menstrual disorders. Tens

(04:03):
of thousands of women went on to use the drug
over the next few years, and in nineteen fifty nine,
Searle submitted an application for its approval as a contraceptive.
The company and the pill researchers expected the application to
sail through the FDA's review process, after all, the drug
had already been deemed safe for public use. However, that's

(04:25):
not how things shook out. Instead, the FDA sat on
the application for months, going back and forth on whether
or not to approve it. The delay wasn't so much
due to concerns over en of it It's safety or effectiveness.
It was more that the agency had never seen a
medicine quite like it. The pill was the first drug

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that wasn't designed to treat or cure a medical ailment. Instead,
it would be prescribed to healthy women on a long
term basis for a purely social purpose. The FDA was
uneasy with that concept, so too were many Americans who
objected to birth control on religious grounds. It took a
bit of prodding from the researchers behind the pill but eventually,

(05:09):
on May ninth, nineteen sixty, the FDA approved the contraceptive
usage of enovid. By the end of nineteen sixty one,
more than four hundred thousand American women were taking the pill.
By the end of nineteen sixty three, the number had
grown to two point three million, and by nineteen sixty
five it had more than doubled again, with more than

(05:32):
five million American women on the pill, accounting for about
forty percent of all young married women in the country.
Similar oral contraceptives were soon approved for use in other
countries as well. Journalists and playwright Claire booth Loose celebrated
the pill's rising global influence, writing quote, modern woman is

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at last free as a man, is free to dispose
of her own body, to earn her list, to pursue
the improvement of her mind, to try a successful career.
Those words were especially true after nineteen seventy two, when
the U. S. Supreme Court finally made the pill legally
available to everyone. Prior to that, only married couples looking

(06:17):
to plan their families were given the right to use
the pill, and many states had laws against distributing contraception
of any kind to single people. Those restrictions finally ended
in the early nineteen seventies, when the court ruled that
treating married and unmarried people differently violated the equal protection
clause of the Fifth Amendment. As you might imagine, Seerle

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made a fortune off of Enovid, though the company's monopoly
on the oral contraceptive market was fairly short lived. Other
early branded pills stole some of its thunder, as did
growing concerns over the medication's connection to health problems such
as thrombosis. Still, Enovid continued to be prescribed in lower

(06:59):
t doses until nineteen eighty eight, when its production was
discontinued for good. Today, the pill is the most common
contraceptive used by women in the US, the UK, and
many other countries, and four out of five sexually experienced
women are thought to take it at one time or another.
That's a situation that's unlikely to change anytime soon. But

(07:23):
it's worth noting that hormonal contraceptives for men have been
in development since the nineteen seventies, and one recently passed
initial human safety tests That means a male version of
the pill could be ready in less than a decade.
Some believe it will be a shakeup that could usher
in a golden age of reproductive freedom for everyone. But

(07:45):
if the history of women's birth control is anything to
go on, we'll probably just argue about it endlessly instead.
I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you now know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. If you'd
like to keep up with the show, you can follow
us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TDI HC Show,

(08:09):
and if you have any comments or suggestions, you can
always send them my way by writing to This Day
at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays and Ben
Hackett for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening.
I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day
in History class.