#protect women
Image from History.com.
#OTW 1960: FDA Approves “THE PILL”
By Miriam Kleiman, Public Affairs
The FDA’s May 9, 1960 approval of oral contraception, aka “the pill”, transformed reproductive health. Women’s health advocate Margaret Sanger spearheaded and activist/philanthropist Katherine McCormick funded the R&D needed for this medical research breakthrough to improve women’s lives through “birth control.”
Margaret Sanger, a nurse, coined the term “birth control” and dedicated herself to educating women. Her own mother had 18 pregnancies in 22 years and died from ovarian cancer. In 1914, she started a newsletter, The Woman Rebel, to “advocate the prevention of conception.”
The Woman Rebel, No. 1; 3/1914.
Sanger was indicted repeatedly and even arrested on obscenity charges under the Comstock Laws (1873) which defined birth control as obscene and made it illegal to send contraceptive devices or even info about it through the mail.
United States v. Margaret H. Sanger; 8/25/1914, National Archives at New York. Emphases added.
Flyer from benefit held on eve of Sanger’s trial for opening Brownsville Clinic. (Courtesy of Sanger Project).
Katherine McCormick heard Sanger speak in 1917 and grew convinced that women could only fully control their lives if they could control ifandwhenthey chose to bear children. She redirected her advocacy to the cause of birth control, even smuggling in diaphragms from Europe to New York at Sanger’s request.
When her husband Stanley died in 1947, Katherine inherited an estate estimated worth almost $40 million (more than $500 million today). Margaret Sanger introduced her to Gregory Pincus who was doing pioneering research on fertilization and hormones.
Katharine funneled to Dr. Pincus more than $2 million ($25 million today), nearly all of the money used to support his lab’s research and development of the contraceptive pill.
Read the National Archives Prologue Magazine storyRich, Famous, and Questionably Sane to learn how McCormick, who was blamed her husband’s inability to consummate his own marriage, became the catalyst for the sexual revolution.
Women Hold Banner at National Women’s Conference, November 1977. NARA ID 7452290.
See also:
- Records of Rightsexhibit:Anti-Contraception Campaign 1914
- DocsTeach:Indictment of Margaret H. Sanger, 8/25/1914
- DocsTeach:Margaret Sanger: The Woman Rebel
- DocsTeach:Reproductive Rights Documents
- Margaret Sanger Papers, supported in part by the National Archives National Historical Publications and Records Commission
- Women’s Rights-related records
- Women’s Rights: Legislation and Advocacy
- Women’s History Month Special Topics page
if men were the ones that needed abortions, you could get an abortion pill at the dollar store.
you’re delusional if you think there are any ethical ways for a woman to be sold like an object.
The affirmation model is putting our most vulnerable young women through a modern meat grinder.
Transgender ideology is harmful. Sex is the body, genders are the chains. Abolish gender.
there is no woke or acceptable way to put conditions on which abortions are allowed! individual choices about your fucking body are not the same as eugenics! abortion on demand without apology!
don’t like abortions? just ignore them like you ignore kids in care and dads that don’t stay :)
I am incandescent with rage. Rage and grief and fear for the future. https://www.instagram.com/p/CdJEd0bOVk1/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
