"McCormick's involvement with the Pill is extraordinary. I think she's one of the most underappreciated figures in not just Pill history, but the entire history of scientific and technological innovation. First of all, it was very uncommon for a woman in the 1950s to have the kind of fortune that McCormick had. She had a fortune that was so vast that, as John Rock said at one point, she couldn't even spend the interest on the money that she had. So she was unique from the get-go in simply having this access to capital... At the time, the pharmaceutical companies which had historically been involved in some kinds of birth control production, like condom production and diaphragm production, saw the Pill project also as too controversial. Many large companies had passed on the opportunity to develop the Pill, including Pfizer and Merck, because they just didn't want to touch it. And so, were it not for McCormick, it's unclear how the Pill would have been developed. She really deserves credit for single-handedly financing one of the most important developments of the 20th century."
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Sources
Andrea Tone, “Roots of the Pill”, PBS.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hormonal_birth_control
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Hormonal birth control
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