Birth control becomes a reality for millions of women
9 MAY 1960
In 1920, the American social reformer Margaret Sanger wrote: “Woman must have her freedom: the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have.” Sanger’s early 20th-century advocacy for birth control was not merely radical, but called for advances in medicine that must have seemed like the stuff of science fiction. Yet, by the 1960s, Sanger’s dream would become a reality thanks to the development of the first oral contraceptive pill – an achievement in which Sanger herself was involved.
Sanger’s interest in reproductive health had first begun when she was working as an obstetrical nurse in the early 1900s and noticed the links between poverty and high infant and maternal mortality. Not only were parents unable to care for their children, but unplanned pregnancies often compelled women to seek unsafe abortions. However, in the process of lobbying for wider access to birth control, Sanger was lambasted by the Catholic church, and – after the Second World War – even found herself being connected to McCarthyite conspiracies about communist infiltrators.
Still, Sanger persisted, and by the 1950s, was devoted to developing an oral contraceptive. To help her on he
