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Birth Control Pill

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Birth Control Pill
The Little Pill That Could
In a time when women had no freedom other than being housewives and baby factories, one woman took a stand for every woman 's rights as a human being. In the late 1800s birth control, a term coined by Margaret Sanger in her newspaper, Women Rebel, in 1914, was considered to be immoral by most religious groups. Sanger pleaded with society to implement some form of birth control so as to give aid to her fellow women who were looked on as nothing more than objects that would bend to the will of man.
The birth control pill was the brainchild of Margaret Sanger and Katherine McCormick, who later petitioned Gregory Pincus to give life to their dreams of a "simple, cheap, and safe contraceptive" (Sanger qtd. in Brown). Pincus then recruited Russell Marker who had changed a cholesterol from sarsaparilla roots into human "pregnancy hormone," progesterone. Marker 's work was later taken up by Frank Colton. "It was Colton 's version of the birth control pill that, in 1954, Pincus and gynecologist John Rock chose to field-test" (Brown). After clinical trials on 6,000 women in Puerto Rico and Haiti, the first commercially produced birth control pill, Envoid-10, was marketed in the United States. The birth control pill is a combination of estrogen and progestin that prevents ovulation and pregnancy. The birth control pill, commonly referred to as "The Pill", was licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. According to David Allyn, it was herald as a "revolutionary invention, a medical triumph over human biology". By 1962 1.2 million women were taking The Pill, 5 million within five years, and by 1973, about 10 million (LEDA). The Pill has made a great and positive impact on today 's society. The birth of The Pill opened new opportunities for women other than just being a housewife or a mother. It allowed them to have new career choices. The Pill changed the way people think about relationships or sexual relationships and also brought



Cited: Brown, Nancy Marie. "The Life of the Pill." Mar. 1995. 05 Sep. 2005 Cohen , Sandy. "Birth Control Pills Helped Empower Women, Changed the World." 17 Jul. 2005. 05 Sep. 2005 Feldman, Rita. "A Pill A Day" 05 Sep. 2005. Health24.com. "Benefits Beyond Birth Control." 05 Sep. 2005 Legal Electronic Document Archive. 05 Sep. 2005 London School of Economics and Political Science. "Birth Control Rights: The Impact on Women 's Wellbeing." 18 Jul. 2005. 05 Sep. 2005 USC Student Computing Facility. "The Birth of the Pill." 05 Sep. 2005

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