The Pill's Pioneers: Thank You, Margaret Sanger, Dr. Djerassi, Et Al

Dear Margaret & Katharine, Dr. Rock & Dr. Djerassi,

My generation has a special debt of gratitude to the Pill pioneers. Please accept warm thanks as the least we can do for your splendid efforts. Imagine it addressed in a flowing hand, sealed with wax and a kiss to each of you for making the world safer for love.

We are not yet 50, Barack Obama and I, but we belong to the first American generation to come of age with a safe and legal birth control pill. How about that? Historians consider 1961, the year John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, as the cusp of a new post-Baby Boomer cohort. It was as if the Pill were invented and approved for us in 1960, after decades of struggle -- for we were the first to ride that wave all the way to shore. Were we blessed? Yes. Did we know that? No. We didn't know what an easy ride we had through the teens, 20s, 30s and 40s. Facing 50, we are suddenly saying good-bye to a friend who was always there, right on time, more trustworthy than desire or flesh.

Margaret Sanger, thank you for your subversive spirit about a century ago. As an Irish Catholic nurse on the Lower East Side in New York, you saw so many young women die of childbirth or unwanted pregnancies. So you decided to do set up the first birth control clinic, promptly raided by police. At the same time suffragettes were making scenes out on the streets of Washington and getting arrested, you knew women had to claim the right of reproductive freedom -- not wait for it to be given. Votes for women finally passed into law in 1920. You opened the American Birth Control League in Brooklyn in 1921. "Birth control" was an utterly new concept. Back in the 1920s, the zeitgeist felt like oxygen to women, the best breeze in American history. Feeling free and glad to be alive, more and more left the country for the cities. Your place in history is as the revolutionary founder of Planned Parenthood and the first to imagine a "magic pill" like the one that we use today.

Katharine McCormick, a true meeting of minds took place when you and Margaret Sanger met in Boston in 1917, where she gave a lecture on public health and birth control. Heiress to a fortune, you spent a large sum of it to further research on a birth control pill, a vision you shared with Sanger. In 1950, you gave $3 million for the drug research trials necessary for federal approval. You were a progressive and generous philanthropist who saw this thing all the way through to the 1960s. According to PBS's "American Experience," you received little to no recognition of your persevering role in supporting the Pill in newspaper stories and obituaries. This is the public thank you note you never got, and a lesson never taught.

A brief pause in the citations to look at church and state at this time. In 1959, on the cusp of a new American era and generation, the old President Dwight D. Eisenhower sided with the future and not the past. He said birth control was "not our business," that is, not properly part of the political or government domain. That deserves some kudos, doesn't it? It's enough to make me like Ike. As for the Pope and the Catholic Church, the rock of Peter was no help at all -- what a surprise. But the Pill's time was coming.

Now to finish the honors. Dr. John Rock of Massachusetts and Dr. Carl Djerassi of California: Many thanks are due to you, too, on the frontlines of the medical and chemical frontiers of the Pill. As early (or as late) as the 1940s, Dr. Rock publicly confronted the state of Massachusetts by asking permission to teach birth control methods at Harvard Medical School. Rock, the most dedicated ally of the Pill project in the medical establishment, helped the company G.D. Searle test and bring the Pill to market in 1960. In 1962, the oral contraceptive developed by Djerassi, made by Syntex, was approved as well. A professor of chemistry at Stanford University throughout his career, Djerassi, a European Jewish refugee as a youth, got his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in the 1940s. He's also known for an important collection of Paul Klee modern art and an autobiographical account of his journey with the Pill.

Sad to say, Margaret Sanger was not celebrated by the masses. But she was alive in her 70s to see the day her "magic pill" dream was realized. She did not became fabulously wealthy or famous before she died in 1966. There were a few, a handful who knew she was a flowering of American 20th century womanhood. Isn't that the way the story goes. In the annals of American history, subversives so seldom get thanked for their troubles. But the muses of a generation born in the 1960s shall not forget you, Margaret. Brava!