Too often we take our sexual and reproductive choices for granted until they are directly threatened by government action. Today, we’re going to celebrate the life of Gregory Pincus, who helped create the birth control pill. His willingness to tackle such a difficult scientific, social, political, and religious subject is a good example of how everyone has a role in the fight for equality.
Pincus was born on April 9, 1903, when the idea of birth control was more about timing of intercourse than any sort of medication or even condom use. His parents, Polish-born immigrants Elizabeth and Joseph Pincus, lived in Woodbine, New Jersey, a Jewish town established by and for Eastern Europeans fleeing persecution. The town was both an agricultural and educational center. Pincus’ father and uncles all taught agricultural science, which likely influenced the scientist’s interest in how hormones affected mammal reproduction.
Pincus was an intelligent and driven student. He earned three degrees – a bachelor’s at Cornell University in 1924 and both a master’s and a doctorate from Harvard University just three years later – back to back. Technically, Pincus was an endocrinologist, since he focused on hormones and their effects on the body. From 1927 to 1930, he conducted post-doctoral research at Cambridge University in England and at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Germany and was then hired to teach at his former school, Harvard, in 1930. By the following year, he was an assistant professor.
Pincus’s most widely-known breakthrough came to the public’s attention with a Look magazine article in 1937. In 1934, he had successfully used in vitro fertilization techniques in rabbits and spent the following year testing until he published his findings in 1936. The world was terrified of him and what he had accomplished, some calling him Frankenstein. Other scientists claimed that his findings were false and that they could not achieve similar results. If this scientist could do this with animals, what would he do with humans? It is no real surprise, then, that he found himself without a job in 1937.
While Pincus himself struggled to find acceptance among academics and scientists who a few years before had praised him, he fought for the rights of others. In 1943, Pincus discovered that one of the leading chemists of his day, Percy Julian, was barred from attending the American Association for the Advancement of Science simply because he was black. Pincus claims that he worked to get Julian and other scientists into the meetings and took on organizational management duties to ensure that worthy scientists were included based on their research and skills, not on skin color. Oddly the AAAS prided itself on allowing membership for all scientists, but membership apparently did not include attendance at the meetings. White women had first become members in 1850, just two years after the society was founded, but they were rare among the overwhelmingly white male membership.
Since jobs were no longer coming his way, Pincus decided to team up with other scientists to create ways to continue his research. In 1943, he and Hudson Hoagland co-founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Massachusetts. The foundation later moved to Shrewsbury in 1947. In 1944, he helped at the first Laurentian Hormone Conference (LHC) for endocrinologists from around the world, and he would continue to chair that conference for the next 24 years. While the conference did very well, the Worcester Foundation struggled with fundraising, because looking into reproduction – controlling it directly and not merely through breeding practices – was socially taboo, even when only applied to animals.
Funding became the way in which women’s rights activists Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick influenced Pincus’s decision to start looking into human reproduction. Sanger first met Pincus at a dinner party and over the following years continued speaking with him and even finding funding for him from her own Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. (PPFA) to tackle the issue of human reproduction. The goal was a 100% effective means to prevent pregnancy. By 1953, Sanger introduced McCormick to Pincus, and his funding was increased fiftyfold.
Pincus did not develop the birth control pill on his own. He had help from doctors Min-Chueh Chang and John C. Rock. At first, they conducted human trials of various hormones and combinations of hormones on Rock’s patients and then at other locations such as Puerto Rico, where their numerous birth control clinics were attempting to help poor families limit their sizes. This combination mestranol/norethynodrel pill, later marketed as Enovid, was successful but had a lot of side effects, according to some of the trial leaders, while others reported similar side effects with placebos. With trials in five different locations between 1953 and 1959 showing promise and the need for such medication evident in the neverending flow of volunteer subjects, the FDA approved Enovid as a contraceptive in May 1960.
The LHC and the Worcester Foundation would both continue for years after Pincus died from bone marrow cancer on August 22, 1967, at the age of only 64, possibly caused by his work. He left behind a wife, Elizabeth, and their children. Before we cheer Pincus as a fighter for sexual freedom, we need to consider some of his words from an interview earlier in the same year he died: “I am against women having sexual freedom. But I hasten to add that I am also opposed to sexual freedom among men.” While Pincus may have been primarily looking for funding to advance his studies and support his family, these words actually show a man who had the idea of equality between men and women when there was (and still is) a firm double standard. The fact that Pincus and Chang also created treatments for breast cancer and an early version of the morning-after pill suggests that they knew there was a hunger for such freedom of choice regardless of personal opinions.
As we know today, hormonal medications do indeed have many side effects, but women (and men) are often willing to take those risks for the chance to enjoy sex without risking pregnancy. The fight to control reproduction, one’s own and others’, continues today. Pincus, Chang, and Rock’s work was an important step toward improving the choices of millions if not billions of people today. To read some of Pincus’ work, you can visit the Center for the History of Medicine at Countway Library or try the Library of Congress to request access.