Margaret Sanger Funded the Pill With $40,000 Out of Her Friend's Will

On October 15, 1951, in Mexico City, the Bulgarian-American chemist Carl Djerassi and his colleagues at Syntex synthesized a compound they named norethindrone — an orally active progestin much more powerful than progesterone itself. Djerassi was 28 and was not, at the time, thinking about contraception. He was thinking about menstrual disorders and infertility treatments. The contraceptive application came from elsewhere.

That elsewhere was almost entirely two people. Margaret Sanger, the American birth-control activist who had founded what became Planned Parenthood, had been arguing since the 1910s that women needed a contraceptive method they could control without male cooperation. In 1951 she met the Harvard-trained reproductive biologist Gregory Pincus and asked him to invent one. Sanger then introduced Pincus to Katherine Dexter McCormick, an MIT-trained biologist and the heir to the International Harvester fortune, who had been looking for somewhere to spend her widowed wealth. McCormick wrote Pincus a check and kept writing them; over the next decade she personally funded approximately $2 million of the development work.

Pincus partnered with the Boston obstetrician John Rock for clinical trials, initially carried out in Puerto Rico in 1956, where local laws permitted contraceptive testing that Massachusetts at the time did not. The pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle synthesized the trial preparations under the brand name Enovid. The FDA approved Enovid for menstrual regulation in 1957 and for contraception on May 9, 1960. Within five years, the pill was the most popular reversible contraceptive in the United States, and the entire structure of postwar gender politics shifted around it. Djerassi spent the rest of his life pointing out that he hadn't asked for it.