Post‑War Era · 1960
Oral Contraceptive Pill (Enovid)
Female Sexuality, Natural Law and the Future of the Family
On 9 May 1960, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid — manufactured by G.D. Searle, developed by the biologist Gregory Pincus with funding from the philanthropist Katharine McCormick, and championed by the veteran birth-control campaigner Margaret Sanger — for use as a contraceptive. The drug had been sold since 1957 for "menstrual disorders," a convenient fiction that allowed physicians to prescribe it off-label to women who wanted to prevent pregnancy; the 1960 approval opened the door to prescribing it openly for the purpose it had actually been designed for.
The moral panic that followed was sustained, global, and explicitly framed in religious-ethical terms. The Catholic Church's opposition was formalised in Humanae Vitae (1968), the encyclical in which Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the ban on "artificial" contraception and warned that separating sex from procreation would lead to "marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards." Secular critics worried the Pill would encourage promiscuity, destabilise marriage and reshape family life in ways no society had sanctioned. Several US states still had Comstock laws on the books from the 19th century making it a crime to sell or even describe contraceptives. Connecticut's law was overturned in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which established a constitutional right to privacy for married couples using contraception; Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) extended that right to unmarried people.
What was at stake beneath the moral rhetoric was a specific social settlement: that female sexuality should be regulated through marriage and pregnancy. The Pill unhooked one from the other. The backlash was an unsuccessful attempt to hold that settlement in place. By the 1970s the Pill had become the most widely used form of reversible contraception in the developed world, and its effects on women's educational attainment, labour-force participation and economic independence are among the most thoroughly documented social consequences of any 20th-century technology. The critics were not wrong that the Pill would remake society. They were wrong to treat the remaking as decline.
The moral panic that followed was sustained, global, and explicitly framed in religious-ethical terms. The Catholic Church's opposition was formalised in Humanae Vitae (1968), the encyclical in which Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the ban on "artificial" contraception and warned that separating sex from procreation would lead to "marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards." Secular critics worried the Pill would encourage promiscuity, destabilise marriage and reshape family life in ways no society had sanctioned. Several US states still had Comstock laws on the books from the 19th century making it a crime to sell or even describe contraceptives. Connecticut's law was overturned in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which established a constitutional right to privacy for married couples using contraception; Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) extended that right to unmarried people.
What was at stake beneath the moral rhetoric was a specific social settlement: that female sexuality should be regulated through marriage and pregnancy. The Pill unhooked one from the other. The backlash was an unsuccessful attempt to hold that settlement in place. By the 1970s the Pill had become the most widely used form of reversible contraception in the developed world, and its effects on women's educational attainment, labour-force participation and economic independence are among the most thoroughly documented social consequences of any 20th-century technology. The critics were not wrong that the Pill would remake society. They were wrong to treat the remaking as decline.
Useful links:
- Elaine Tyler May – *America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation* (Basic Books, 2010)
- Andrea Tone – *Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America* (Hill and Wang, 2001)
- Pope Paul VI – *Humanae Vitae* (Vatican, 1968)
- *Griswold v. Connecticut*, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) – Oyez
- PBS American Experience – "The Pill"