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[ 2 47 ] Los Angeles, 1961. Two young women taking the oral contraceptive die of thromboembolic disease. This news shocks the Searle Company, whose scientists expected their research would have already uncovered the possibility of such a serious potential complication. Castel Gandolfo, Italy, 1968. In his long-awaited pronouncement on birth control, Pope Paul condemns all methods of contraception, except the rhythm method, as against the will of God. New York, 1969. Barbara Seaman’s The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill ignites a firestorm of controversy and leads to congressional hearings on the safety of oral contraceptives. In 1964, John Rock expressed confidence that within a few years the pill would change the mind of the Catholic Church about the intrinsic evil of contraception , easing anxieties about unwanted pregnancies for millions of couples around the world. Once the Church liberalized its attitude toward birth control , he believed, the problem of global overpopulation could be addressed through various contraceptive practices. The contraceptive landscape did change dramatically over the next several years. By the time the next decade opened, the pope had chosen to maintain traditional Catholic policies, and some women’s liberationists had joined the Catholic hierarchy in opposition to the pill, although for very different reasons . For the church, opposition to the oral contraceptive arose from fear of the separation of sexuality and reproduction. For many feminists, the issue was medical malfeasance. Their opposition to the pill arose from the belief that doctors and the drug companies had conspired to keep from them information about what they believed were the pill’s dangerous, and potentially lethal, side effects. Margaret Sanger, who died in 1966, and Katharine Dexter McCormick, who died the following year, would have been surprised to learn Chapter 9 the pill falls from gr ace t he fer t ilit y d o c tor 2 4 8 that what they saw as a force for women’s liberation would come under attack from a new generation of feminists. Rock would be hit from both the left and the right. A heroic champion of a new and liberating technology in 1964, he had become a beleaguered defender of a suspect drug by 1970. What had happened? The story is complex and begins, as does many a story of the 1960s, with the coming of age of the baby boomers. The men and women of the largest generation in American history were reaching adulthood in a world that was unprepared for them and coming of age just as the world of their parents was disappearing. Cracks in the foundation of America’s international supremacy had widened, the Vietnam War provoked opposition and skepticism about cold war policies, glaring racial inequalities could no longer be suppressed in an era of rising expectations, colleges and universities were bursting at the seams, and increasingly, women were less willing to be content with the idea that their role in life was to marry and have children. We call this revolutionary era the sixties, but it really began at mid-decade. This is part of the context in which the pill controversy played out. It’s not that the kinds of behavior—unconventional sex, youthful rebellion —that would come to be seen as emblematic of the baby boomers had never occurred before. In fact, this sexual revolution wasn’t even the first one that we had experienced. As long ago as 1913, a popular magazine claimed that “Sex O’Clock” had struck in America. Moralists in the days before World War I complained about an end to public reticence about matters best left in the bedroom. This earlier sexual revolution had been fueled by an urban workingclass youth subculture that flaunted sexuality, by the glamorous bohemian lifestyles adopted by young (and some not so young) middle-class rebels, by feminism, and by an aggressive frankness on the part of the antivice movement . As a result, it seemed, everyone was talking about sex until they were forced to begin to talk about war.1 But the transformation that began in the mid-1960s was different, in part because the baby boom generation was so large, in part because higher education had become democratized, and in part because the civil rights movement among other forces had helped to broaden the “base of America’s public culture,” to borrow historian Beth Bailey’s phrase.2 This time around, the sexual revolution emerged from larger social movements—for racial equality, women’s liberation, gay rights, and independence from constraints...

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