Much of the feminist movement revolves around choice: It should be a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy. It should be a woman’s choice to determine how many children to have and when. And choice can be created by birth control.
On May 9, 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that a drug called Enovid 10mg would be made available as a contraceptive. Since then, oral contraceptives have been made available to women all over the world. The pill is used by about 12 million women in the United States and 100 million women worldwide. And yet, there has been and always will be resistance to the pill.
Some people believe that it encourages promiscuity and immorality by allowing women greater sexual freedom. Some don’t believe in creating an artificial cycle, as it could be bad for women’s bodies. But the benefits of the pill significantly outweigh the costs, and it should be appreciated for what it has done for women everywhere.
There are other forms of birth control that can be used, but the pill is special. It is the most effective, most reliable and most convenient form of birth control for women. So useful are oral contraceptives that doctors often prescribe them for other medical reasons such as acne and menstrual symptoms.
There is such a wide variety that, once a woman finds the right oral contraceptive for her needs, the only drawback is a lack of protection against sexually transmitted diseases. Time magazine reported the results of a 40-year study that found that “women who take the pill are less likely to die prematurely from any cause, including cancer and heart disease.”
“I went on (the pill) for really, really painful periods,” said Emma, a first-year anthropology student who wished to remain anonymous for personal reasons. She started taking oral contraceptives in her junior year of high school and said that it is now her preferred method of birth control.
The facts indicate that many other women feel similarly: 53 percent of the 3.1 million teenage women who use contraceptives use the pill. It is the most popular method for teenagers, women in their 20s, women who have never married and women who are college-educated; about one-third of women of childbearing age in the United States use the pill.
These numbers hide that the pill has had a turbulent history of availability. Women did not always have the choice to use oral contraceptives, and sometimes still don’t. Even though the pill was introduced in 1960, it wasn’t until 1972 ““ 12 years later ““ that the pill was made available to women, married or single.
Certain religious beliefs forbid the use of contraceptives of any kind, as seen in the Humanae Vitae, a Catholic doctrine issued by Pope Paul VI in 1968. Japan approved Viagra six months after it was introduced, but after 10 years of research, still hasn’t approved low-dose oral contraceptives for women.
Several states still have so-called “conscience clauses,” which allow doctors or pharmacists to deny contraceptives to a patient because of religious or moral beliefs. And, it can be too expensive for some women and is rarely provided in the way condoms are: If you walk down to the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center, they have a convenient basket of condoms ““ but the pill can run up to 50 dollars a month. Even so, the struggle to provide the pill is part of women’s struggles to create independent, self-reliant lives.
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, famously said, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
As Emma said, “(The pill) made me feel a lot safer, (with) a lot more control over my body. (It means) the freedom to choose what I do with my life. It’s a way for me to be independent and to rely on myself.”
For women who take the pill for its intended purpose, it means exactly what Sanger wanted it to mean: freedom to choose the course of a relationship, the nature of the growth of a family and the extent of their sexual activity. It means not having to rely on a sexual partner to provide condoms or other forms of birth control, and it means almost complete reliability in preventing pregnancy if a condom fails.
It means sexual empowerment in a way that was entirely impossible 50 years ago.
If we think about how women have been sexually repressed throughout the centuries and in a multitude of cultures, and if we think about how convenient, reliable and available the pill is, it’s easy to see that the pill was truly an enormous step forward for women everywhere.
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