Every day, a small pill makes the bodies of millions of women think they are pregnant. The chemical fraud that prevents pregnancy gave women freedom in the 1960s.
American Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) fought for women's rights all her life, and the foundation of this struggle was laid as a child, in the house where she grew up in Corning, New York.
Her father was a freethinker and fighter for equality, he forced his children to read books on social policy.
Sanger proudly recalls how her father's civic meeting on human rights ended up being bombarded with tomatoes by the city's Catholics. But the sad fate of her mother prompted her to fight for birth control. The mother was pregnant 18 times and gave birth to 11 children before, emaciated and ill, she died of tuberculosis at 50.
Later, when Sanger worked as a nurse among poor expats in New York, she saw pregnancy and childbirth exhaust working-class women to death.
Sanger talked about a special case that was a turning point for her: a 28-year-old woman, after an illegal abortion, begged a doctor for help. “Let your husband sleep on the roof,” the doctor replied. The woman later died in front of Sanger after another illegal abortion.
Preventing pregnancy is not new
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Sanger teamed up with wealthy and women's rights activist Katharine McCormick (1875-1967) and biologist Gregory Pincus (1903-1967). With the help of a Mexican plant, a chemical laboratory and a gynecologist, John Rock (1890-1984), they succeeded in inventing the birth control pill in 1957.
The simple everyday American name for the drug, the pill, is indicative of the breakthrough it has become; The "pill" was called "almost perfect" in the book "Foundations of Love" (Kærlighedens ABZ), written in 1961 by Inge Hegeler (1927-1996) and Steen Hegeler (1923). Thanks to artificial hormones, women could control their womb and have sex just for pleasure, without fear of pregnancy.
Preventing pregnancy is not a new invention. In ancient times, women tried to lubricate the vagina with oil, inject herbal suppositories, or drink herbal teas. The calendar method and the method of interruption of intercourse were also known, which were then the most important methods of limiting the birth rate.
All of these methods, however, were unreliable, which is why the history of induced abortion is as long as the history of contraception.
Preservation was taboo
Better methods of contraception were invented around 1900, such as condoms, pessaries, and flushing devices. Therefore, it is a mistake to believe that then all families were at the mercy of biology, because the number of births among women in Denmark was halved between 1900 and 1950. In families, on average, instead of four children, there were two.
The problem was that for a long time contraception was taboo, since in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, copulation was considered an act of reproduction, not desire. Even in the 20th century, contraception has long been considered a crime.
It was with these norms that Margaret Sander and her Danish associate Tit Jensen (1876-1957) wanted to end it in the 1920s. The lack of education also had a negative effect on society, as women from the working class gave birth to many children.
Huge turn to first birth control clinic
Soon after her experience in the slums of New York, Sanger began publishing articles on contraception, and in 1913 she published the newsletter Woman Rebel, which pioneered the use of the phrase "birth control."
In the same year, she was forced to flee to Europe, as her "newspaper", according to American law, was accused of immorality. In 1916, she and her sister opened a birth control clinic in New York. The line on the opening day of the clinic stretched almost to the corner of a neighboring street. In 1917, she went to prison to distribute pessaries, and in 1932, her shipment of pessaries from Japan was confiscated in the port of New York.
In parallel with Sanger's feminist project, scientific interest in female physiology grew in the world. This led to an in-depth study of hormones and fertilization. The struggle for women's rights and science met in 1951, and oral contraceptives were the result of this productive work.
Rat ovulation
As early as the 19th century, biologists began to understand the mystery of reproduction. In 1826, the Estonian zoologist Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876) discovered that mammals develop from a microscopic egg.
In 1876, the German zoologist Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922) showed that the prerequisite for fertilization is the penetration of sperm into the egg. Thus, he refuted the opinion that the embryo of life is a male seed, and a woman is just a simple container for him.
Around 1900, an interest in hormones arose, and when the rat stopped ovulating, after being implanted with a fetus taken from a pregnant rat, the link between hormones and pregnancy began to become clear. It turned out that the ovaries are also a gland that produces hormones.
When an egg slides into the fallopian tube, a corpus luteum forms in the ovaries, which produces both female sex hormones, progesterone and estrogen. In the event that a pregnancy occurs, it continues to produce these hormones. They signal the brain that you are pregnant and that the body should not develop new eggs.
Progesterone is more expensive than gold
In 1937, three American biologists came up with the bright idea of stopping ovulation in a rabbit by giving her sex hormones, which became the basis for the theory of creating birth control pills for humans. No egg - no pregnancy.
The problem is that all hormone researchers then did not think about contraception at all. The outstanding revolutionary chemist Russell Marker (1902-1995) did not think about it when he went on a trip to the rainforests of Mexico in search of plants containing sex hormones.
The market value of progesterone in the early 1940s was much higher than gold, so Marker was looking for a cheap alternative. And he found it in the roots of a wild yam. No company in the United States wanted to sponsor his research, so he went back to Mexico and formed Syntex. At one point, he produced 2.3 kilograms of progesterone using a syrup from this plant at a market price of $ 240,000.
Nowhere in the world has so much progesterone been seen in one place before. Marker later closed the firm, but his successor, a Jewish war refugee Carl Djerassi (1923), found a way to produce artificial progesterone. It was eight times more potent than the Marker version, and Jerassi's new hormone could also be taken orally.
Didn't want to be associated with birth control
In 1950, Sanger had what she most needed to realize her dream of effective contraception for women, namely money. Her friend and feminist Katherine McCormick has decided to invest heavily in the development of birth control pills.
The fateful union between the two women and science came a year later, when Sanger persuaded Gregory Pinkus, head of the hormone lab, at dinner, to direct research into an oral contraceptive with McCormick's money.
He began collaborating with gynecologist John Rock and the pharmaceutical firm Searle, which, however, operated in secret because it did not want it to be associated with research on birth control.
The topic was still taboo, and no one in the industry believed in the idea of birth control pills.
Contraception has become a new topic of discussion
John Rock was not only a reproductive researcher, but also a believing Catholic. However, he did not sympathize with the moral principles of the church or the Massachusetts law that forbade doctors from recommending contraceptive methods, so he secretly taught his students and distributed pessaries to patients.
But when he treated 50 women with sex hormones in 1954 under the guise of fertility research, he was well aware that his reputation was at stake.
After months of treatment and research, the unmistakable conclusion could be drawn: none of the 50 women had ovulation when they were taking the sex hormone.
The research that John Rock presented at a scientific conference later that year became a sensation. In his speech, he did not mention a word about contraception, but the audience had no doubts about this, and the news became a new topic of discussion in the scientific world and the pharmaceutical industry.
Medicine for irregular menstruation
The birth control pill, however, was still just a dream. Will the contraceptive effect last for a long time, and what will happen to the body if you take hormone pills for one to two or three years? Are there any serious side effects? Nobody knew that. In 1956, Pincus and Rock decided to test the pills away from their native United States - in a social housing block in Puerto Rico, where new birth control pills were offered to 200 women.
Once again, it turned out that the pills have an amazing contraceptive effect and few side effects. After another trial in Haiti, Searle decided to ask the FDA for permission to bring Enovid tablets to market as a treatment for irregular menstruation.
Never before have so many women suffered from irregular periods as in the late 1950s, which prompted Searle to make "the biggest leap in the history of the pharmaceutical industry," as written in Bernard Asbell's book, The Contraceptive Pill: The Story of the World Changing Drug (The Pill: A Biography of the Drug That Changed the World, 1995).
Previously, medicines were not given to healthy people, but in 1959 Searle requested permission to sell Enovid as a contraceptive. The firm feared a violent public reaction, but this did not happen. In 1960, Enovid was recognized as a contraceptive, and at that time, 80-year-old Sanger finally saw her dream come true.
No side effects reported to women
But birth control pills weren't entirely safe. In 1961, Searle reported 100 cases of blood clots in women using these contraceptives, which then included a very high dose of the hormone. In a 1967 British study, this was confirmed, but the pills were still not removed from the market, since the risk was still small.
The problem was rather that the majority of women did not inform the doctor about possible side effects, and they could not read about it either. It took decades and vigorous battles with pharmaceutical companies for women to compensate for these few but serious side effects.
Since 1997, over 100 Danish women have received a total of 47 million kroons (over 425 million rubles) in compensation for blood clots resulting from the use of the contraceptive pill. There is still an increased risk of blood clots even with modern low-dose hormonal contraceptives, although this is rare.
More and more babies are born as a result of artificial insemination
The contraceptive pill has caused a decline in fertility in all European countries.
In Denmark, fertility peaked in the early 1980s, when one woman averaged 1.4 children. Today, this figure is not much higher, and many women now experience difficulties not in order to avoid children, but in order to have them.
More and more babies are being conceived through science outside the womb. In the 1980s, artificial insemination began to be used in Denmark, and today every 12th child is born in a petri dish.
Morten Arnika Skydsgaard, Gunver Lystbæk Vestergård