While this book might have benefited from more detail illustrating the hard lives of women before the advent of the pill, it does a masterful job explaining the imagination, perseverance and daring it took to ease their plight. Doctors are men and have not had a baby so they have no pitty. I have miss a few weeks and don’t know how to bring myself around. Women were desperate to control the size of their families, as evidenced by the 250,000 letters Sanger received asking for help: “ ‘I am 30 years old. The available birth control, in the form of condoms and diaphragms, had a high failure rate.

Sanger’s quest was to free women to have sex without the fear or possibility of pregnancy, thus allowing them to pursue education, careers, equal footing with men. It is hard to recall today just how radical this proposition was in 1950. It had to be safe and reversible, so that if the woman wanted to get pregnant, she could. A woman should be able to use it without her sexual partner’s knowledge. Sanger explained to Pincus her lifelong dream, an idea so outrageous as to seem magical: a cheap, simple birth-control method that would allow sex to be spontaneous - no risking mistakes in the heat of the moment. The scientist was Gregory Pincus, author of controversial attempts to breed rabbits in a Petri dish. The woman was Margaret Sanger, who had spent 40 years in a crusade to start the organization that became Planned Parenthood. The story begins in 1950, with a meeting one winter night “high above Park Avenue” between “an old woman who loved sex” and a scientist once compared in the press to Frankenstein. But it was, finally, rabbit progesterone that provided the key to safe, effective birth control, and thereby hangs a gripping tale, one that Jonathan Eig tells with suspense and panache in “The Birth of the Pill.” Kate Manning is the author of “My Notorious Life,” a novel about a 19th-century midwife.Ĭrocodile dung, weasel bone, beaver testicles: These are just three of the unlikely ingredients humans have used in attempts to prevent pregnancy over the centuries.

The birth of the pill by jonathan eig