"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?"