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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we continue our Centennial Series, 100 years of 100 Things, and because March is Women's History Month, Our thing number 76 is particularly relevant to women's increased independence and participation in the workforce and just control over their own bodies. Birth control, 100 years of birth control. Joining me now is Elaine Tyler May, regents professor emerita of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota and author of several books including America and the Pill: A History of Promise and Peril. Welcome to WNYC. Professor May, thank you for joining our 100 Years of 100 Things series.

Elaine Tyler May: Thank you for inviting me.

Brian Lehrer: Starting off just before 100 year timeline, 109 years ago, 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn in 1921. Sanger followed this with the establishment of the American Birth Control League. Elaine, everyone has heard the name, but who is Margaret Sanger very briefly? What was new with birth control technology or anything else that these steps were taken in 1916 and 1921?

Elaine Tyler May: Well, Margaret Sanger was a socialist, a feminist, an activist, and she wasn't the first or the only person or woman activist to be involved in advocating for birth control. There were others who were also very well known. Emma Goldman worked also alongside Margaret Sanger. She was a radical anarchist and was very committed to the cause.

Margaret Sanger was also funded by another woman activist by the name of Catherine McCormick, who was the widow of Cyrus McCormick who had developed the reaper machine for farming, and so she had a lot of resources at her disposal. They were all part of a group of radical feminist women, socialist anarchists, progressives who were supporting the development of the birth control movement as it grew. It wasn't invented then, it wasn't started then. There's a long history of efforts to control reproduction in various ways with various kinds of devices. The diaphragm was not new, but it was being newly utilized and marketed.

This was coming on the heels of Comstock Laws. Anthony Comstock was a postal inspector who was blocking the use of the mails for any anything that he considered to be obscene, and he considered birth control information and devices to be obscene and he was blocking the males. Margaret Sanger actually went to prison for for violating some of these laws and became very well known in progressive circles and really across the country for the work that she was doing.

Brian Lehrer: I want to jump ahead to the 1950s next in the timeline, which is when development of the first oral contraceptives really kicks off. In brief, what became available when?

Elaine Tyler May: Well, the federal law that opened up the birth control pill for marketing by the FDA. The FDA approved the oral contraceptive in 1960, and within almost immediately, women, millions of women, were using the birth control pill. It took about two to three years before Catholic women were using the pill to the same degree as non-Catholic women, because the ban against any kind of contraceptive method was still in effect in that time frame, but the eagerness to take advantage of an opportunity to control reproduction was across the board with women from all backgrounds, including Catholic.

Brian Lehrer: When you say it took two to three years, it's really only two to three years for Catholic women to be using it as much as non-Catholic women, and so in--

Elaine Tyler May: That's also because then, yes, the ban was not lifted.

Brian Lehrer: In 1962, there's a landmark Supreme Court decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, ruling that married couples have the right to use contraceptives. How quickly did birth control take off in the '60s? Well, you were just telling us that. Griswold, was birth control outlawed by the State of Connecticut? Was that the point of the lawsuit? What about single women who weren't explicitly what the Griswold case was about?

Elaine Tyler May: Right. These laws were statewide. They were not national laws. Connecticut did ban birth control until the Griswold decision. Yes, women were not-- and Griswold, as you pointed out, only applied to married women. It wasn't until 1972 that the legality of birth control was extended to non-married people. You have that regulation that limited the use of birth controls to married couples. It's interesting, too, that the Griswold decision was based on the right to privacy. It was not explicitly linked to reproductive freedom, and that was also true for the Roe decision. Roe v. Wade was also based on right to privacy, but it was extended beyond married women to anyone.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Griswold, for people who don't know, was the landmark decision that kind of set the precedent on which Roe was based. Then, in 1969, much less well known, a medical journalist named Barbara Seaman publishes The Doctor's Case against the Pill. Can you talk about Seaman's argument and the safety concerns raised against hormonal contraceptives and their scientific validity or not?

Elaine Tyler May: Well, there were, of course, risks associated with the pill, especially in the early years when the hormone content was very high, and there were risks and dangers. There were risks of blood clots. There were side effects that were troublesome and dangerous, and there were doctors on all sides of this.

John Rock was a well known physician who became involved in promoting the birth control pill and having testing with humans before the pill was approved by the FDA, they had to have some human experimental tests. Rock and others, Gregory Pincus was another scientist who was involved. There were physicians all across the country and really across the world who were involved in these early studies. Some of the studies have gotten a bad name.

There's a lot of historical controversy about, for example, experimental studies that were conducted in Puerto Rico, but the fact is that as soon as those studies opened up in Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican women were lining up to be part of the study. They were so eager to have the opportunity to control their fertility. The studies were utilized, of course, to help provide the scientific basis for the effectiveness and safety of the pill, but it wasn't really until after the pill was approved that a lot of women, and feminists, in particular, kept clamoring for a safer pill with a lower dose of hormone and more effective ways of monitoring the health of women who were on the pill.

Brian Lehrer: Throughout the 1980s, '90s, and early 2000s, we see more variety in birth control methods on the market. Could you talk for a minute about the Affordable Care Act and its impact on the availability of birth control? I know there was a Supreme Court case around that, but is Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, important to discuss here in terms of what's not just on the market or legal, but actually available to people?

Elaine Tyler May: Well, I think more than Obamacare, the really interesting and frightening political development has come in the Trump administration with efforts to, right now, even today in the news, to outlaw birth control and abortion altogether, any kind of reproductive rights. These are laws that are anti-women law.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, can you explain that? Everybody knows that, of course, there are attempts to outlaw abortion in many states now that the Trump appointed justices overturned Roe, wut where does birth control come in? Who's trying to outlaw birth control? Where?

Elaine Tyler May: Well, some of the more right wing advocates of closing down access to all kinds of rights for women are also interested in closing down reproductive rights for women. It's all part of a kind of anti-progressive, anti-feminist, anti-woman effort on the part of a lot of right wing politicians right now.

Brian Lehrer: To finish up with 100-year lens, how different a world is it, especially for women, but really for everybody because of birth control compared to, let's say, 1925, 100 years ago?

Elaine Tyler May: Well, I think that there's only one way to really think about the impact of birth control, and that is as it was linked to the movement for women's rights and women's emancipation over the decade. That's also true for the pill since 1960. The big revolution in birth control was the arrival of the birth control pill. It was revolutionary because it was completely in control of the woman, and her sexual partner did not even need to know if she was using the pill, which was not true for other forms of birth control like the diaphragm and, of course, the condom, which way predates any of the recent advances in reproductive technology.

I think that, for sure, in terms of the pill, had it not been the feminist movement's support of and embrace of reproductive rights, the pill would have been just one more form of contraception to be regulated in the same way that it had been previously, but really, the feminist movement took hold of the whole issue of reproductive rights and pushed it over the decades to where we are now. I think it's somewhat of a surprise to those of us who have been tracking this for decades that there's now a pushback coming from the right wing, coming from the Trump administration as part of an effort, really, to disempower women. That's really what it's about.

Brian Lehrer: That's our 100 Years of 100 Things segment number 76, 100 years of birth control here in Women's History Month, which, by the way, is not canceled on WNYC like it is at many federal agencies now. My guest has been Elaine Tyler May, regents professor emerita of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota, and author of books including America and the Pill. Thank you so much for your knowledge and your time. We really appreciate it.

Elaine Tyler May: Thank you so much for having me.

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