Okay, so I’m a day early, but the confluence of these two events is just too good to let pass with commenting. I have to admit, my personal bias is toward celebrating the FDA’s announcement of its intention to approve the birth control pill, if only because it’s done more to improve the lives of mothers around the world than anything else I can think of. Providing women with the ability to control if or when they will get pregnant makes a dozen carnations and an order of New York Cheesecake pancakes at the IHOP once a year look like a booger. Okay, a lanyard, I guess.
Gail Collins in her column intoday’s NY Times breaks down the history of the pill and contraception in general, including the difficulties that some of the early pioneers in the field had to overcome.
[Anthony] Comstock managed to get New York authorities to grant him the powers to both arrest and censor, and he bragged that he sent 4,000 people to jail for helping women understand, and use, birth control. He seemed to take particular pleasure in the fact that 15 of them had committed suicide.One of his targets was Margaret Sanger, a nurse who wrote a sex education column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for a left-wing New York newspaper, The Call. When Comstock banned her column on venereal disease, the paper ran an empty space with the title: “What Every Girl Should Know: Nothing, by Order of the U.S. Post Office.
Comstock died of pneumonia brought on by a chill he suffered during the trial of Sanger’s husband for passing out pamphlets dealing with contraception, but his legacy lives on in the attempts by many in the anti-abortion movement to label the pill an abortifacient (it isn’t).
In 1975, the pill was the subject of a song by Loretta Lynn, and the lyrics really speak to how much difference the pill made to women. Today, the pill is so popular that political opponents disguise their legislative intentions or resort to outright falsehoods about how it works, and are still failing to make significant inroads against it. Some of that may be messaging, but more of it is due, I believe, to the fact that most women refuse to go back to a world where they don’t have control over their bodies.
So Happy Pill Day, and Happy Mother’s Day too. And maybe if you are spending the day with your mother (or mother-in-law), ask her how much difference the pill made. And don’t eat that cheesecake-pancake sandwich.
