"Much of the criticism of the pill, however, as Watkins has shown, arose from the fact that the pill altered the relationship between women and their physicians. In retrospect, it is clear that women’s rejection of medical paternalism underlay much of the social criticism leveled at the pill. We believe that the unique decision-making processes that introduced oral contraceptives and allowed them to remain on the market even after potentially dangerous side effects were discovered are an important and instructive example of the intermingling of science, policy, and practicability in the approval process for a revolutionary twentieth-century drug."