​The Pill

The Pill is the most revolutionary medical breakthrough — after penicillin. 

My grandmother died at 85. That was 40 years ago. She had 10 living issues out of 18 conceptions. A difficult child birth had broken her back.

In her times, the moment a young woman became close to a man, there was every possibility that she would get pregnant. She would have to bear one dreadful year. For my granny, Butter should not come close to fire lest it gets melted. Feminine liberty was a distant mirage. Celibacy was the best birth control.

But for Margaret Sanger, an American nurse it was different. She always believed that,

   “It should be in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will or will not become a mother.”

  So she had opened the first birth control clinic in America in 1916 and was promptly sentenced to jail for 30 days.
1930:

Dr Gregory Pincus, a professor at Harvard was the first to fertilize a rabbit’s ova in a test tube. That should be the world’s earliest In Vitro Fertilization. But it only led to his removal from Harvard. In 1936, suddenly he was without a job for his non Catholic research.
At that time, Russell Marker had already discovered that generations of Mexican women had been eating a certain wild yam for contraception. Marker was able to extract progesterone from these yam.

   Gregory Pincus was sure that  he could combine estrogen with it to formulate the first birth control pill. But where is the fund and where is the powerful patron ?
Katharine Dexter McCormick :

  Katharine Dexter was the first woman to get a science degree from the then all-male M.I.T., graduating in biology in 1904. For this she had to petition to be allowed to wear a shorter skirt. The reason for the later—she didn’t want her dress to drag across the unclean floors.  Her plan was to go into medicine.
But before that she was married off to the rich McCormick who was suffering from schizophrenia. McCormick died without any child. That also made Katherine a millionaire and a widow. She not only donated $ 2 million to Pincus for research,  but also being a biologist from MIT was able to guide the research. She was the patron saint.*

As a result, “The Pill” was licenced in 1960. The United States saw a sharp increase in the number of women attending college in the years following. Katherine even had to commission the first girls dormitory in her Almamater.

   Unfortunately my grand mother was already bent from her 18 pregnancies by then. But her numerous grand daughters today can plan their career and future without the fear of mixing with boys in the college.
I always believe the Pill is the most revolutionary medical breakthrough — after penicillin of course. No other thing has contributed as much to the progress of women liberty.

* The issues for which Katharine Dexter McCormick (1874-1967) fought seventy-five years ago were:

birth control, sex education, abortion, equal pay for equal work, and freedom from sexual harassment. She was a driving force in the battle for the women’s vote, the formation of the Women’s League of Voters, the creation of Planned Parenthood, and the development of the birth control pill.