More than 100 million women around the world start their day by taking a birth control pill. Now 50 years old, the pill is being celebrated for bringing a power shift to women's lives which has enabled millions of women to continue their education, earn higher incomes and have richer life experiences.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill on May 9, 1960 in the United States but it wasn’t available to married women in all states until a court case in 1965 and wasn’t available to single women in all states until another court decision in 1972. In the first decade of availability few college health clinics offered it and some schools made it available only if the woman brought in a note from her minister saying she planned to be married. Even Planned Parenthood required a woman be married to get the pill. Today some 12 million married and unmarried American women use birth control pills.
Time magazine reporter Nancy Gibbs provides extensive coverage of the development and implications of the pill in a cover story titled: The Pill at 50: Sex, Freedom and Paradox. She notes the pill’s major impact was the transformation of women’s lives:
“By the 1970s the true impact of the Pill could begin to be measured, and it was not on the sexual behavior of American women; it was on how they envisioned their lives, their choices and their obligations. In 1970 the median age at which college graduates married was about 23; by 1975, as use of the Pill among single women became more common, that age had jumped 2.5 years. The fashion for large families went the way of the girdle. In 1963, 80 percent of non-Catholic college women said they wanted three or more children; that plunged to 29 percent by 1973. More women were able to imagine a life that included both a family and a job, which changed their childbearing calculations.”
Gibbs continued, “Employers, meanwhile, lost a primary excuse for closing their ranks to women. It helped that as more women were knocking on the doors, more companies were eager to open them; by 1966, unemployment was around 3.8 percent. Federal manpower expert Howard Stambler said, 'There are almost no men left' to hire. That year the number of adult women working jumped nearly 10 percent.”
Others have also noted the impact on women’s ability to plan their lives and live richer lives. Gloria Feldt, author and former national Planned Parenthood president, said in an interview with EmpowHER that access to birth control changes everything: “Family planning empowers women by enabling women to basically plan their lives, to be able to plan and space your childbearing, to know that biology is not necessarily destiny. It enables women to be able to get an education. If you can plan and space your childbearing, then you can think about, 'Well, what is it that I’d like to do with my life and when would I like to have children as part of my life? When will I be ready to have children? When will I be able to support children properly?' And that is just an incredible, incredible liberty that I hope women appreciate."
Feldt added, “You know, birth control has become so normal and routine that it’s like the air and the water to many young women these days. Well, I think we all need to understand that it may not always be there. It hasn’t always been there, and we should appreciate that ability that we have now to decide for ourselves whether and when to be mothers and therefore to be able to decide what education we want to have, what career we want to pursue, what relationship we want to be in. It changes. Family planning changes everything.”
What do you think? Has access to birth control made a difference in your own life? What would your life be like it wasn’t available or if it was only available to married women? How do you think oral contraceptives have changed women’s lives overall?
Resources:
Time magazine – Nancy Gibbs, The Pill at 50: Sex, Freedom and Paradox
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1983712-1,00.html
EmpowHER.com - Gloria Feldt: How Does Family Planning Empower Women?
https://www.empowher.com/media/video/how-does-family-planning-empower-women-gloria-feldt-video
About the author: Pat Elliott is a journalist and blogger who has written about health issues for more than 20 years. She is also a cancer survivor who coaches people on how to manage their transition and take control of their new future.