DIAMOND DESIGNATION FOR ‘THE PILL’
As the contraceptive pill celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of its launch, SP looks at the history of what is often described as one of the most significant medical advances of the 20th century.
T
he pill – a combination of the hormones oestrogen and progestin – was developed in the United States in the 1950s by an
American biologist named Dr Gregory Pincus.
The very first pill, however, had actually been invented in the late 1940s in Mexico City by a chemist named Dr Carl Djerassi. Dr Djerassi used wild yam roots to synthesise progestogen, a steroid hormone that produced the effects of the natural female sex hormone.
Although he invented the pill, however, Dr Djerassi didn’t have the facilities for testing or manufacturing, and so Dr Pincus was to be accredited as the creator of the modern pill.
The first commercially available birth control pill was the work of another American chemist, Frank Colton.
The pill was eventually approved for release in 1960 in the US and, within two years, it was being used by 1.2 million American women.
In 1961 the pill was introduced in the United Kingdom, following clinical trials that were carried out in London, Birmingham and Slough. At the time, the UK’s health minister, Enoch Powell, announced that the oral contraceptive would be made available through the NHS – but to married women only.
This was because the government wanted to make it available to older, married women who didn’t want to have any more children, or to women whose health would be at serious risk if they were to become pregnant.
The NHS Family Planning Act 1967, however, recognised that unwanted children in low income households also posed serious financial strain on the families and, as a result, the pill became more widely available through the NHS. The Family Planning Association was also able to approve use of it in its clinics.
Up until the arrival of the pill, women were more or less expected to stay at home while their husbands were out at work and to produce children. In effect, they had little control over when and the number of times that they became pregnant. This situation began to change when Marie Stopes opened its first UK birth control clinic in London in 1921. Five more clinics were to
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