Women

"The gender disparity among editors, in other words, has led to serious issues with Wikipedia’s content. One longtime editor, the Chicago-based college student Emily Temple-Wood, said she’s identified almost than 4,400 female scientists who meet Wikipedia’s standards for notability, but don’t have a page."

"It’s not just Wikipedia’s editor demographics that point to a gender gap at the company. Perhaps the fact that it’s a company that is comprised, in part, by anonymous users on the Internet makes a gender gap impossible to avoid. Despite all the progress that women in the workplace have made over the past century, the Internet is still largely a new frontier."

"[Wikipedia] is therefore a reflection of the world's biases more than it is a cause of them. ... If journalists, book publishers, scientific researchers, curators, academics, grant-makers and prize-awarding committees don't recognize the work of women, Wikipedia's editors have little foundation on which to build. ... We may not be able to change how society values women, but we can change how women are seen, and ensure that they are seen to begin with."

"Of course, I wasn't the only woman dealing with this sh**, and eventually the toxic environment started ripping Wikipedia apart from the inside. Over the next five years, the number of Wikipedia editors shrank by over a third, with most of those that left being women."

"Wikipedia is biased towards men because most of its editors are male, according to a study of the online encyclopedia."

"The government is spending big bucks to find out why Wikipedia is so sexist.... Last year, a New York Times op-ed called out Wikipedia for having a separate section dedicated to female novelists after the writers were removed from the “American Novelists” page. And others have grumbled that entries on supposedly male-centered subjects like baseball cards and “The Sopranos” are much longer than posts on topics that might be more appealing to women."

"Beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story. And it can be particularly unwelcoming to women."

"Wikipedia is amazing. But it’s become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess."

"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia...."

"Targeted harassment of women online is all too common. One woman has decided to create a Wikipedia page for a woman scientist every time it happens to her."

"Why, then, are we not jumping at the chance to fix the gender imbalance where we can: in the most widely-read, accessible and culturally ingrained information distributor out there? Why are so few women editing Wikipedia?"

"The most dangerous and well-documented side effects commonly associated with the Pill are heart attacks and strokes. The eight-year Nurse's Health Study at Harvard Medical School found that Pill users are 250 percent as likely to have heart attacks and strokes than those who don't use the Pill, probably because the Pill excessively increases blood clotting ability."

"[I]t is obvious that the Pill has contributed greatly to our country's exploding divorce rate, which was about 18 percent in 1965 and now stands at about 50 percent."

"According to United States Federal courts, the birth control pill has been classified as "unavoidably unsafe." This means that, implicit in a woman's consent to use the pill, even if she is not entirely informed of its dangers, is an acknowledgement of physical risk."

"After the Pill was introduced in the mid-1960s, fornication and 'shacking up' both almost doubled in a period of only five years. This behavior also increased steeply when abortion was legalized in 1973. People of all ages (but especially teenagers) are fornicating more than ever before. Wife-swapping clubs, sex addiction treatment organizations, hard-core pornography, and 'fantasy [sex] tours' to Far East nations have increased tremendously. Even the original developers of the birth control pill now acknowledge that their invention has led to widespread promiscuity. Dr. Robert Kirstner of Harvard Medical School said that "For years I thought the pill would not lead to promiscuity, but I've changed my mind. I think it probably has." And Dr. Min-Chueh Chang, one of the co-developers of the birth control pill, has acknowledged that "[Young people] indulge in too much sexual activity ... I personally feel the pill has rather spoiled young people. It's made them more permissive.""

"There is not the slightest doubt that a woman who is over 35, who smokes, and who, in addition, may be obese and has hypertension should not use OCs. Progestogen (mini) OCs have a slightly higher failure rate and a greater incidence of irregular bleeding than have combined OCs. The mini OC has little place in women who need effective hormonal contraception and good cycle control. The mini OC may have a place in a patient who finds other contraception unacceptable and in whom estrogens are contraindicated specifically."

"The possibility of hormonal contraception was postulated as early as 1919 by the physiologist Ludwig Haberlandt in Innsbruck. The same year, he began to test his hypothesis in animal experiments. In 1924 he succeeded in his efforts to render mice infertil by orally administering ovarian and placental extracts. He failed to have his method tried in women."

"Since preventing ovulation prevents pregnancy, one could employ the same principles in birth control as in preventing dysmenorrhea [painful menstruation] Thus, for example, if an individual took 1 mg. of diethylstilbestrol [a synthetic estrogen] by mouth daily from the first day of her period for the next six weeks, she would not ovulate during this interval. A hormone regiment would have to be worked out that allowed periodic menstruation, but the medication could be administered to make the menstrual period come on the least undesirable day. Such manipulation of one’s menstrual rhythm is probably not to be advocated indiscriminately, but there is no evidence at the present time to suggest that the individual will not return to her pre therapeutic rhythm on cessation of therapy. By the 1950s both endocrinology and steroid chemistry had advanced far enough so that a hormonal contraceptive was possible. The initiative for a major effort to develop a physiological contraceptive did not come from scientists or physicians, however, but from laywomen. And the scientist that they chose to realize their hopes for better birth control was a refugee from academic biology."

"One of the early female graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Katharine McCormick believed in science and in the advancement of women. Margaret Sanger witnessed unwanted pregnancies -- and desperate abortion attempts -- when she worked as a nurse among New York's poorest women. Though they came from different worlds, the two women set out to improve women's lives through "birth control," a phrase Sanger coined. When Sanger and McCormick first met in 1917, women had been working for decades to achieve the vote. Thirty-nine years had gone by since a constitutional amendment for women's suffrage was first proposed, and three more years would pass before the states ratified it. At a time when women struggled for voting rights, job opportunities, or access to education, both McCor-mick, a suffragist, and Sanger, a birth control proponent, were outspoken advocates for giving women more control over their own lives. Thirty years later, McCormick's sizable inheritance combined with Sanger's tireless advocacy would bring about the birth control pill and spark a revolution. "An estimated eighty percent of all American women born since 1945 have taken the Pill," says historian An-drea Tone, giving them the ability to plan their reproductive lives."

"I invented the pill at the request of a woman."

"Historically, contraception was believed to affect the voice negatively. However, more recent studies using low-dose oral contraceptive pills (OCPs) show that they stabilize the voice. However, stabilization generally occurs only during sustained vowel production; connected speech appears unaffected. Therefore, singers may be the only population that experiences clinically increased vocal stability as a result of taking hormonal contraceptives."

"The early production of progesterone was extremely complex and laborious and the resulting product prohibitively expensive. Butenandt required a ton of cholesterol, obtained from the brains and spinal cords of cattle and the grease from sheep's wool, to obtain 20 lbs of starting material from which commercial quantities of progesterone could be produced. Progesterone, when available, was quoted at $l,000/gm. What opened the door for the development of the pill were two advances in steroid chemistry: the introduction of a new technique that changed progesterone from an expensive rarity to the cheapest of all steroid hormones, and the subsequent modification of the progesterone molecule to make it effective orally."

"[Margaret Sanger] said that when she started out in 1912, one of the first things she thought of was a new method for women to use. She after all was a nurse. She was an obstetrical nurse. She knew about birth control. She knew what methods were out there, and she knew they were lousy. She knew they worked sporadically. She knew it took the cooperation of the male and the female, the man and the woman, to make the method work. This was not always satisfactory, and she wanted to apply science and medicine to her feminist mission of giving women control of childbearing, so from the very early days in 1912, she dreamt of a pill. She knew the science wasn't there yet, which is why it took over four decades for this to happen."

"The introduction of oral contraception in 1960 was not the result of one person's fortuitous discovery as happened with X rays or penicillin. It was, rather, the product of small accretions of knowledge resulting from the effort, talent, and determination of many people over a period of years."

"The history of the development of oral contraceptives (OCs) has been a progressive reduction in dosage to what is now probably the lowest does that is compatible with the desired therapeutic effect -- to inhibit ovluation. Yet, controversy and argument continue."

"G.D. Searle and Company was only able to patent the specific steroids developed in its laboratories, not the term “The Pill” or the concept of using steroids as contraceptives. And Searle never would have supplied Pincus with the experimental drugs he needed if in doing so they had risked their right to exclusive control over compounds they developed. Nevertheless, Pincus only encouraged McCormick to make all of her contributions directly to the foundation after G.D. Searle had begun supporting the pill project with both experimental drugs and specific research grant."

"The chemical history of the pill begins with the isolation of progesterone in May 1933 by Corner and Allen. With the help of Dr. Hickman from the research laboratory of the Eastman Kodak Company, they used high-vacuum distillation of the oils extracted from corpora lutea to isolate the hormone in a crystalline form which they named progestin. Before the end of that year, Wintersteiner and Allen determined the structural formula of the hormone (C21 H30 O2). This admittedly was not difficult, since the structural formula of pregnanediol was known from previous work by Butenandt. As Allen later recalled, the correct structural formula of progesterone had originally been sketched on a napkin during a lunch with William Strain, long before the definitive structural proof was furnished! In the summer of 1934 the isolation of crystalline progesterone hormone was announced also by Butenandt and Westfall in Danzig, by Slotta et al. in Breslau, and in Switzerland by Hartman and Wettstein. A short time later Butenandt and Schmidt converted pregnandiol to progesterone, and Fernholz succeeded in synthesizing progesterone from stigmasterol."

"When the Pill came on the market in 1960, it was enthusiastically embraced by the medical profession and the public. But by the end of the decade, after a crisis over the drug Thalidomide (which was prescribed for morning sickness and caused birth defects) and increasing reports of potential health risks from the Pill, confidence in the drug was ebbing. In 1969 concerns came to a head with the publication of The Doctor's Case Against the Pill."

"In January 1970 experts assembled in the stately Senate chamber and began giving their testimony on the hazards of the Pill. Alice Wolfson, a member of the radical collective D.C. Women's Liberation, was sitting in the audience listening to the experts. Her group had come to the hearings because they had all taken the Pill at one time or another and had experienced side effects. The group was outraged that their doctors had never informed them of the risks when they prescribed the Pill. As they sat in the chamber and heard one male witness after another describe serious health risks, they were furious that there wasn't a single woman who had taken the Pill there to testify. After hearing one expert say, "Estrogen is to cancer what fertilizer is to wheat," the women spectators could no longer contain their anger. They stood up and started hurling questions at the men on the dais. The feminists set the room abuzz when they demanded, "Why are you using women as guinea pigs?" and "Why are you letting the drug companies murder us for their profit and convenience?" When told by Senator Nelson to sit down and remain quiet, they retorted, "We are not going to sit quietly! We don't think the hearings are more important than our lives!" Although Senator Nelson was the driving force behind the hearings, the young protesters were so angered by his failure to include women in the hearings -- and by what they viewed as his patronizing behavior --that they went on the attack. The group decided to protest the structure of the hearings and the men leading them, in addition to speaking out about the medical dangers of the Pill. The feminists' grievances gained national attention. National television networks covered the proceedings, and Wolfson's group appeared frequently on the nightly news during the hearings. An estimated eighty-seven percent of women between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five fol-lowed the hearings. Eighteen percent of them quit taking the oral contraceptive as a result of the hearings. In the hearings' aftermath, hormone levels in the Pill were lowered to a fraction of the original doses. A few years after the hearings, prescription rates rebounded, and the number of users in the United States peaked at approximately nineteen million. The real impact of the hearings was not on Pill usage, but on the nascent consumer health movement. D.C. Women's Liberation succeeded for the first time in making informed consent a national issue. In the aftermath of the hearings, the U.S. government would require the pharmaceutical industry to include a patient information sheet with complete information on side effects in every package of birth control pills sold. The growing women's movement was prompting women to assert control over their bodies, and in doing so it changed forever the way Americans take prescription medications."

"With the arrival of the birth control pill in 1960, many believed the Church was about to change the position it had held for centuries. The Church was in the midst of reform, and in this climate of modernization it seemed possible that the Vatican might bend on birth control. Since 1957, Church law had allowed women with "irregular" cycles to take the Pill to regularize their cycle and enable them to better practice the rhythm method. Approval of the contraceptive pill, many believed, was soon to follow. Pro-Pill Catholics had a powerful ally on their side. John Rock, the eminent Catholic physician who had carried out Pill trials with Dr. Gregory Pincus, publicly argued that the Pill was merely an extension of the body's normal functioning. Since the Pill used the same hormones already present in the female reproductive system and did not tamper with sperm, Rock believed the Church should view the Pill as a "natural" form of contraception. The Vatican convened a commission to study the question of the Pill, but the Church would take eight years to determine its policy towards the Pill. In the interim, the Pill quickly became the most popular method of birth control among American women —regardless of religion."

"McCormick apparently never understood that Searle had paid a large portion of Pincus’ salary for years. Rather, as McCormick explained to Abraham Stone, Pincus was “acquainted with some one [sic] in the Searl [sic] Company.” Exactly how he was able to convince them to provide free experimental drugs for the project on a large scale was never explained. In fact, Searle’s steroid chemists played an important role in the pill’s development. Although similar feats were being duplicated in a number of competing industrial laboratories, the large number of synthetic hormones that a they were producing gave Pincus an essential variety of compounds with a wide range of effects that he could try on animals, selecting for clinical trial only a few of the most promising out of the dozens that had some contraceptive effect. But McCormick has shielded from the commercial aspects of the project she was subsidizing. Nevertheless, her contribution was vital. She provided the funds that turned a desultory PPFA project into a crash program to develop an oral contraceptive. Pincus asked Searle for substantial help on the project only after he had suppressed ovulation in women with a progesterone regimen. By then he knew that he could develop an oral contraceptive. Searle’s cooperation simply hastened the process. When the first successful use of synthetic steroids as an oral contraceptive in women was announced in ‘’Science’’ in 1956, Sanger wrote McCormick: You must, indeed, feel a certain pride in your judgment. Gregory Pincus had been working for at least ten years on the progesterone of the reproductive process in animals. He had practically no money for this work and Dr. Stone and I did our best to get a few dollars for him and I think that the amount we collected went to pay the expenses of Chang [senior scientist, WFEB]. Then you came along with your fine interest and enthusiasm and with your faith and . . .things began to happen and at last the reports . . . are now out in the outstanding scientific magazine and the conspiracy of silence has been broken. Although “conspiracy of silence” may have been an exaggeration, throughout the late 1950s few scientists believed an oral contraceptive was at hand."

"IN 1967 the National Science Foundation commissioned a study of the relationship between basic research and technological innovation. What role did “nonmission” research, research motivated solely by a desire for knowledge,, play in the development of new products of great economic and social significance, such as the electron microscope, the videotape recorder, and the oral contraceptive pill? Since the National Science Foundation existed to promote research, it was not surprising when the study revealed that 70 percent of the key events leading to technological innovation resulted from so-called nonmission research. Seventy-six percent of this basic work was done in university laboratories; 14 percent in research institutes and government laboratories. Industrial laboratories made only 10 percent of the original discoveries that advanced knowledge. Large diagrams were provided on which the red dots representing basic research stretched far into the past, while the blue symbols for “mission-oriented research” and the green symbols for “development and application” were clustered near the present. In the diagram explaining the origins of the pill, Arnold Berthold’s 1984 demonstration that castrated roosters do not behave like roosters was given equal billing with key events in the development of twentieth century endocrinology. The overall impression was one of a long chain of basic researches leading inevitably to an oral contraceptive."

"During the 1950s, in the early days of hormonal contraceptive research, pellets of progesterone were inserted under the skin of rabbits to prevent them from conceiving (Asbell, 1995). Forty years later, a variation on those experiments became an approved form of birth control in the U.S. ⎯Norplant. But just as with DMPA, American women had to wait longer than their sisters around the world to have access to this very effective method (Asbell, 1995). Developed by the Population Council and distributed in the U.S. by Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, Norplant was approved by the WHO in 1984, after nearly 20 years of research and clinical trials. WHO heralded Norplant as an “effective and reversible long-term method of fertility regulation ⎯particularly advantageous to women who wish an extended period of contraceptive protection” (Population Council, 1990).Six years later, the FDA approved Norplant for use in the U.S. By then it had been used by a half-million women in 17 countries where it had received regulatory approval (Grimes, 2000). By July 1994, nearly a million women in the United States had chosen to use Norplant implants (Lewin, 1994)."

"The efforts of Sanger and McCormick would have been for naught, however, if it hadn’t been for the medical folk traditions of the descendants of the w:Aztecs. The basic research for the pill became possible when Russell Marker discovered that generations of Mexican women had been eating a certain wild yam ⎯the Barbasco root, also called cabeza de negro⎯for contraception (Chesler, 1992). It was from these yams that Marker was able to extract the progestin that Gregory Pincus combined with estrogen to formulate the first birth control pill (Grimes, 2000). The first pill was far from perfect ⎯but its effectiveness, simplicity, and ease of use extended to millions of women an unheard-of control over reproduction, for the first time allowing them to truly separate vaginal intercourse from procreation (Bullough & Bullough, 1990). Margaret Sanger’s pill made the sexual liberation movement of the ‘60s a lot less risky than the one that occurred after World War I. More than 20years ago, the FDA proclaimed that “...more studies have been done on the pill to look for serious side effects than have been done on any other medicine in history” (Asbell, 1995). That scientific scrutiny has continued to this day. The pill of today, as well as other more recent combined hormone methods —the patch and the ring—offer safety and effectiveness with greatly decreased doses of hormone (Knowles &Ringel, 1998)."

"After her husband died on January 19, 1947, Katharine D. McCormick came into $35 million. A life-long feminist and birth control advocate, she spent the money on what Margaret Sanger, famous feminist and Planned Parenthood founder, explained to her as “the greatest need of the whole [Planned Parenthood] movement”—“a simple, cheap, contraceptive.” Feminists had dreamed of a birth control pill a woman could take without a man’s knowledge, and Rock and Pincus were their best chance yet."

"Ten years after its first release, the birth control pill made headlines again during the Nelson Pill Hearings, a Capitol Hill investigation into the pill’s safety. When feminist activists noticed that no women were being invited to testify, they interrupted the proceedings and testified from their seats. “Why isn’t there a pill for men?” activist Alice Wolfson shouted. “Why are 10 million women being used as guinea pigs?”"

"On June 23, 1960, a decade after the tests began, the hormonal birth control pill hit the market. The idea was simple: Take a little white pill once a day, avoid accidental pregnancy. The implications were revolutionary. Women could work without fear of becoming pregnant. Sex before marriage be-came less risky. Sex after marriage became less fraught. Feminist historians herald this day as the be-ginning of the sexual revolution—but the story of the birth control pill is also one of conflicting ideologies and medical exploitation. The Harvard-educated scientists who formulated the pill relied on invasive tests and shaky medical consent."

"[M]edical history is often swept clean, praising progress without remembering those who suffered to create it. For the most part, the popular narrative of the pill is one of celebration. When a 2009 Harvard Gazette story discussed Harvard’s role in creating the birth control pill, they did so without referencing the Puerto Rican trials or the asylum testing. Pincus and Rock are largely remembered for their contributions to women’s reproductive empowerment, without reference to their troubling methods."

"By the beginning of the 20th-century, the idea of oral contraception in conventional medicine had died. It was not to be revived until the century was half over. The woman who made it happen was Margaret Sanger (Riddle, 1992)."

"The Searle Company developed the first oral contraceptive (OC), Enovid, in the late 1950s. In keeping with defensive anti-litigation strategy, the company extensively tested the Pill on Puerto Rican women before concluding that it was safe for American women to use in 1961."

"The trials began with small-scale tests on rats and rabbits. Each day, for a period of five days, re-searchers pumped immature female rabbits full of the reproductive hormones estrogen and progesterone. On the fifth day, the scientists allowed the rabbits to copulate, then removed their fallopian tubes and examined them for signs of egg fertilization. For years, Massachusetts scientists worked diligently on hundreds of caged rabbits in a basement lab on a shoestring budget, searching for the perfect compound. On June 23, 1960, a decade after the tests began, the hormonal birth control pill hit the market. The idea was simple: Take a little white pill once a day, avoid accidental pregnancy. The implications were revolutionary."

"The original class of birth control pills contained a high dosage of both estrogen and progestin, which led to a variety of side effects, including blurred vision, nausea, cramping, irregular menstrual bleeding, headaches, and possibly breast cancer. Beginning in about 1975, the manufacturers of the Pill, in reaction to adverse publicity generated about the severe side effects caused by the high-dosage pills, steadily decreased the content of estrogen and progestin in their products."

"Searle had originally asked the FDA to consider simultaneously an application for three dosages of Enovid: 10, 5, and 2.5 milligrams. Searle was particularly interested in promoting the lower dosage forms of Enovid because one of the chief criticisms of the pill up to this point had not been a medical one, but rather an economic one. Partly developed in response to concerns about world hunger, it was feared that Enovid would prove far too expensive for woen in poorer countries. The cost of the hormone was directly proportionate to the cost of the drug and the dose. Lowering the dose significantly lowered the cost of Enovid. Searle, therefore, had great incentive to prove the safety and efficacy of its lower dosage pills. As far as Searle officials were concerned, the lower dose of Enovid should not have required a separate NDA because they considered it merely an alternative dose of the same drug. As one Searle representative wrote when seeking approval of the lower dosage: “[I find it] very difficult to understand how less of a drug can be more dangerous than a larger dose...a basic fact of any drug use is adjustment of the dosage to a particular individual’s requirement. That’s all we are trying to do with the lower dosage forms of Enovid....I find it impossible to understand how one increases danger by reducing the dose.” The FDA, however, viewed the dosage question as an issue of efficacy and possibly safety in 1959. The lower doses produced an increased incidence of breakthrough bleeding. It was not immediately clear whether this was an indication that ovulation had not been effectively suppressed. If so, it would have undermined Enovid’s effectiveness as a contraceptive, rendering it unapprovable. The FDA was therefore very cautious in considering any alteration in the original dose formulation of the pill."

"By the end of the fourth quarter of 1964, more than 4 million women had used Searle’s pill. Such unexpected and unprecedented popularity not only surprised the pharmaceutical industry, but amazed physicians, family planners, social reformers and politicians as well. The early enthusiasm for oral contraceptives, however, was soon dampened as the high hormonal doses of the first pill produced nausea, headaches, and dizziness so severe that some women abandoned the pill as quickly as they had embraced it."

"When Searle notified the FDA in 1959 that it wished to submit a supplemental application for Enovid to expand the drug’s labeling indications to include use as an oral contraceptive, it rapidly became clear that the American federal government wanted little to do with the process and saw it as no more than routine bureaucratic process of new drug review and approval at the FDA. As Critchlow and Watkins have discussed in great detail, there mere mention of contraception as a credible component of overseas aid had drawn the opposition of American Catholic bishops. Moreover, with the 1960 presidential election looming, neither President Eisenhower nor the Catholic presidential candidate, John Kennedy, wanted to make an issue out of contraception and the pending approval of the contraceptive pill. In Britain, the central government also vigorously refused to initiate debate over the pill. The British Ministry of Health had stated as early as 1955 that it did not want any involvement with contraceptive testing and approval. Again, in 1956, when news emerged of the possible availability of a contraceptive pill in the United States, the Medical Research Council, the main British government body responsible for clinical trials since 1919, refused to sponsor any monitoring of the new drug on the grounds that it was too politically and morally sensitive an issue for them to handle."

"In Britain, publicity over the pill’s potential risks reached a crescendo in late 1969, when a number of British medical journals and popular newspapers published articles accusing the medical profession of being too complacent on the links between the pill and thrombosis. The debate intensified in December 1969 when Professor Victor Wynn, an endocrinologist and an expert on metabolic effects of anabolic steroids, appeared on a David Frost television program and detailed before millions of British viewers a panoply of risks associated with the pill. Appearing in a total of three Frost programs that month, one of which was broadcast to an audience in the United States, Wynn’s testimony caused public and parliamentary uproar. These broadcasts, together with the publication of the British epidemiological studies linking the pill with thrombotic complications, resulted in the British government warning doctors to no longer prescribe the higher dose (10-milligram) pills. In the United States, an impassioned public debate on the safety of the pill had also been inaugurated with the publications of journalists Morton Mintz and Barbara Seaman. Both journalists challenged what they characterized as the “diplomatic immunity” which had dominated news about the oral contraceptives up to that time by questioning not only the overall safety of the pill but the way in which the U.S. regulatory authorities had approved it. Mintz, in particular, widely publicized as fact that the pill had been tested on only 132 women prior to its approval for contraception and that its safety had not been proven before it went on the market. By the end of 1969 Senator Gaylord Nelson called for congressional hearings (known as the Nelson hearings) on the safety of the pill. The primary focus of the Nelson hearings was on safety and informed consent: Had women been adequately informed about the risks and significant side effects of the pill? Should the pill be removed from the market, or should new studies be instituted?"

"In Britain, government control over the manufacture and supply of pharmaceutical drugs had been tightened in 1947 and 1957. Such restrictions, however, primarily concerned dangerous drugs and self-medication drugs, as well as biological products (e.g., antibiotics, vaccines, and insulin, all of which had to best and ardized by biological techniques). Products had to be scrutinized to insure that their manufacturing methods and potency testing met the stipulated requirements. Drugs subject to these restrictions were only a small minority in the pharmacopoeia. All other drugs could be released onto the British market without submitting to any formal procedure. In general, the British government took a laissez-faire approach toward pharmaceutical companies in the1950s. The only restriction imposed on drugs in this period was that they could not be advertised as curing cancer, venereal disease, or Bright’s disease. Britain and the United States thus had very limited testing requirements when the first pill was initially approved, and Enovid underwent governmental premarket review only in the United States. The 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act specified that a drug is not defined by its ability or lack of ability to treat a disease, but rather as any product “affecting the structure or function of the body.” This language had been incorporated into the 1938 law for the explicit purpose of giving the FDA jurisdiction over products such as obesity drugs (obesity was not considered a disease), nose straighteners, and especially contraceptive devices such as pessaries and condoms, which, like oral contraceptives, had both therapeutic and contraceptive applications. Therefore, by definition, Enovid was a product that clearly fell under the jurisdiction of the FDA."

"G.D. Searle and Company made the first American application for the approval of Enovid to the FDA in 1957.The company sought approval for the use of Enovid in cases of menstrual irregularities, including amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, and menorrhagia, as well as endometriosis (a painful proliferation of uterine tissue outside the uterus) and infertility. Incases of infertility, it had been shown that women who were given the drug for several months-to “rest” their ovaries-often went on to conceive, a phenomenon often referred to as the “Rock Rebound” effect. Although the original submission addressed only gynecological disorders, it was well known among many scientists that this particular formulation could prevent ovulation and therefore could be used as a contraceptive. Publications worldwide had reported Pincus’s work and has speculated on the pills clinical prospects."

"As Watkins has discussed, the Nelson hearings infuriated many women. During the 1960s many feminists had begun to protest against the paternalistic attitudes of the state and male-dominated medicine. After the hearings, women were critical of the process, which excluded testimony from female patients, and angry about the analogies to women as guinea pigs. Many responded by parading in front of the hearings carrying placards demanding “Feed the Pill to your guinea pigs at the FDA not live women.” After the hearings, women’s groups, particularly the Washington D.C.-based Women’s Liberation group, called for new separate hearings centered around women’s concerns, angrily arguing that, “In spite of the fact that it is women who are taking the pill and taking the risks, it was the legislators, the doctors, and the drug company’s representatives, all men of course, who were testifying and dissecting women as if they were no more important than the laboratory animals they work with every day.” In this charged atmosphere, there is no doubt that what feminists took away from the writings of journalists and the Nelson hearing proceedings was that women had indeed served as guinea pigs as drug companies prospered, and that, even ten years later, physicians were still not sure if the pill was safe."

"Once marketed in the United States and Britain, Enovid/Enavid was freely available to women whose doctors would prescribe it, either as a treatment for infertility or for menstrual disorders. Medical doctors in both countries could then, as they can now, prescribe drugs for purposes other than those approved because neither country has ever sought to regulate the practice of medicine. The fact that so many women may (or may not) have had access to Enocid/Enavid years before it was formally approved by FDA as a contraceptive makes any discussion about the approval of the pill which centers upon numbers very difficult. The most commonly cited figure is that by 1959 more than 500,000 women were taking the drug for menstrual disorders in the United States."