Among the thousands of pills offered by the pharmaceutical industry, one is special: the birth control pill. It’s a strange pill because it doesn’t relieve any symptoms like a painkiller pill, nor does it save lives like the antibiotics on a pill. Its origins are research and social movements, and its importance to health pales in comparison to the impact it has had on contemporary culture. It revolutionized the habits and norms of sexual intercourse, opened up a lot of new opportunities for women, and in many respects changed our world much more than other drugs.
The excerpt comes from the book by Thomas Hager “Ten Medicines That Shaped Medicine”, published by the REBIS Publishing House.
Before she arrived, the pleasures of sex were inevitably associated with the possibility of conceiving a new life. And while creating life has been seen by many as God’s exclusive prerogative, we have repeatedly tried to separate sex from making children in our history. In ancient China, women who wanted to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies drank a solution of lead and mercury. In Greece, during the classical period, pomegranate seeds were used as a contraceptive (which was related to the myth of Persephone, who, having eaten a pomegranate in Hades, had to return to it every six months, and then the Earth was barren winter). In medieval Europe, women tied weasel testicles to their thighs, wore wreaths of herbs, and wore charms made of cat bones; tried decoctions and ointments stained with menstrual blood; walked around the place where the pregnant wolf urinated three times – all in order not to get pregnant. The point was not only that pregnancy and childbirth were often the cause of death for young women, nor that getting pregnant before marriage was a sin. Pregnancy meant the end of independence for a woman, depriving her of many opportunities to develop and act, the beginning of a life reduced to domestic duties. Anything that could prevent it, even if it seemed hopeless, was worth trying.
The advent of science did not change this situation much. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the biology of pregnancy – everything that goes on in a woman’s womb for the nine months between conception and birth – was an impenetrable mystery. Pregnancy, of course, could have been avoided by not having intercourse. But apart from that, the only contraceptive measures, which were indeed of dubious effectiveness, depended on men who put on primitive condoms of a wide variety of materials, ranging from sheep’s intestines to linen bags tied tastefully with a colored ribbon around the penis.
Sigmund Freud wrote in 1898: “In theory, one of the greatest triumphs of mankind would be the elevation of procreation to the level of a voluntary and conscious act.” It thus expressed the view of a growing number of experts who, at the turn of the twentieth century, appreciated the importance of new and compelling arguments in favor of birth control, such as the inevitable famine due to overpopulation, the growing women’s empowerment movement, and the desire of many political leaders to rationalize and to capture the unmanageable human urges and their unwanted effects, including the sex drive.
The latter group also included representatives of the American Rockefeller Foundation, which in the XNUMXs, using its enormous financial resources, began to generously support research in a new field of science – molecular biology. Big business and academics alike hoped that such research would help us better understand the relationship between human behavior and their biology, and they all misinterpreted the word “psychobiology”.
The legitimacy of such research was also indicated by many other reasons. The interwar period in the West is a time of political chaos, economic depression, growing fears of communism, urban crime, loosening moral norms and social ties. The Rockefeller Foundation’s goal was to better understand the role of biology in human behavior, to learn about the genetic basis of criminal activities and mental illness, to establish the links between biological processes at the molecular level and our decisions and emotions. It wasn’t just pure science. The people in power and the money who led or advised the foundation wanted to use the knowledge thus gained to create a society of people behaving more rationally, less impulsively; a society that will be durable and, what is also important, more favorable to business. In the XNUMXs, those first disturbing attempts to explore the world of biology-based social control were wrapped by the Rockefeller Foundation in a program with a nice-sounding name, “The Science of Human.” As science historian Lily Kay writes, “the motivation behind [the Rockefeller Foundation] to invest enormously in its new program was to develop the human sciences as an all-explanatory, practically applicable foundation of social control based on the natural, medical and social sciences.” .
Among the many projects funded by the Rockefeller Foundation were also research into the biological aspects of sexuality and sexual life. Only the role of the hormones responsible for our sexual behavior was discovered. Everyone knew that during puberty, men’s and women’s bodies change, showing pubic hair, reproductive abilities and a fascination with sex. Everything indicated that many of these changes were caused by compounds transferred via the bloodstream from the endocrine glands to various organs of the body. It is these compounds, i.e. hormones, that begin to be activated during puberty, and during pregnancy they completely subordinate the woman’s body to themselves. In the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, researchers began to have a vague understanding of how and why this happens, and what factors and relationships play a major role in these processes.
The work of Ludwig Haberlandt, a slim Austrian physiologist with a distinctive mustache, contributed significantly to this, thanks to the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation for hormone research. In the XNUMXs, for example, it was already known that a pregnant woman could not conceive again until she was born. This condition has been scientifically known as “temporary sterility.” In pregnant women, ovulation, i.e. the production of eggs, stops. Haberlandt managed to stop ovulation via the laboratory when he introduced fragments of the ovary of fertilized females into non-pregnant test animals. The injected tissue fragments secreted some substance, a chemical messenger – Haberlandt thought it was a hormone – inhibiting ovulation. In this way, he succeeded in inducing temporary sterility in the animals. He also knew what to do next: isolate the hormone responsible for suppressing ovulation, obtain it in its pure form and turn it into a birth control pill..
The problem was that Haberlandt was ahead of his time. The relatively primitive laboratory technique and laboratory equipment that he had at his disposal in the 1931s prevented him from conducting research at the molecular level, and the lack of appropriate tools and the fact that science was just beginning to study the nature of chemical processes in pregnancy slowed down his progress. Nevertheless, he decided to share his discoveries with the world, and in XNUMX he published a small book on the results of his research showing “in amazing detail – as one expert wrote – the contraceptive revolution that was to come thirty years later.” For this reason, Haberlandta is often referred to today as “the grandfather of the contraceptive pill”.
While still alive, Haberlandt found himself in the fire of criticism in Austria. “He was accused of a crime against conceived life,” wrote his granddaughter, “and he was attacked for moral and ethical reasons by politicians and people of the Church.” All those who were convinced that procreation was the work of God himself and that people had no right to interfere in it turned against him. A year after the publication of his prophetic book, Haberlandt committed suicide.
The baton was taken over by others. Within a few years, as many as four teams of researchers isolated the desired hormone, i.e. progesterone. Later, other teams followed suit by examining the effects of this hormone in the female body. In the XNUMXs, scientists managed to establish the composition and structure of progesterone and other sex hormones: testosterone and estradiol. They were all related and belonged to a family of compounds called steroids, made up of four six-membered and one five-membered carbon rings to which different side chains are attached. Chemists dealing with these compounds to this day refer to the XNUMXs as the “decade of sex hormones”. Later on, the Second World War came and military work was given priority, so the funding for sex hormone research was turned off. Even after the war, everyone wanted more children. One of the few scientists who continued to work on the chemical aspects of contraception was Gregory Pincus, co-founder of the private research group Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology established in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1944. Pincus and his close colleague Min Chueh Chang from China were, like Haberlandt, fascinated by the hormones that influence ovulation.
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