This Day in History: 11 May 2020
11 May 1960
60 years ago, today, the Food and Drug Administration, also known as the FDA, approved of the world's first commercially produced birth-control. This was made by the G.D. Searle Company of Chicago, Illinois. Development of the pill was first commissioned by Margaret Sanger, a birth-control pioneer, and funded by heiress Katherine McCormick. In 1916, Sanger had opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States. With the pill, she hoped to encourage the development of a more practical and effective alternative to contraceptives that were available at the time.
Previously, in the early 1950s, a biochemist named Gregory Pincus, working at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, and John Rock, a gynaecologist at Harvard Medical School, had begun to work on the development of a birth-control pill. Using synthetic progesterone and oestrogen in order to repress ovulation in women, clinical tests of the new pill started in 1954. Afterwards, the FDA approved the usage of the pill, thus granting greater reproductive freedom to the women of America. As well as this, the pill had a dramatic impact on other aspects of social life, such as women's fertility trends, religion, family roles, careers, and premarital sexual practises.
Want to find out more about the approval and effect of the birth-control pill? Click here for more information on the FDA approval, or here for more on its impact.
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