The birth control pill wins the approval of the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA gives its blessing to the ten-milligram dose of Enovid, which by then had been in clinical trials for four years, and the Searle drug company starts selling the pill a month later.
The first pill contained a synthetic progestin, which is similar to progesterone, a steroid that occurs naturally in the human female fertility cycle. The pill was nearly 100 percent effective but came with some severe side effects, including life-threatening blood clots. Further research found that the approved dose was ten times higher than needed.
Science continued refining the pill until, by the 1980s, safer and effective lower-dose variants were available. Other birth control methods evolved as well, including intrauterine devices, although they fell out of favor after one of them—the Dalkon Shield—was found to cause pelvic inflammatory disease. (The fact that the new techniques prevented conception but not the spread of sexually transmitted infections led to other problems as well.)
Today’s woman can still opt for the pill in various forms, although the birth control patch—which slowly releases hormones through the skin—is also proving effective. And Wired reported in 2011 that new, safer IUDs are becoming popular.
The pill empowered women to take control of conception in a way that (generally male-controlled) condoms never had. Though the liberated sexual mores of the late twentieth century surely had cultural roots, the technological underpinning of new birth control methods also contributed.—TL