Invention of Contraceptive Pills

choi

Henry Allen, The Equalizer; How a Jewish biologist, an MIT-educated heiress and a Catholic doctor triggered the sexual revolution. Wall Street Journal, Oct 11, 2014.
online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-birth-of-the-pill-by-jonathan-eig-1412974873
(book review on Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill; How four crusaders reinvented sex and launched a revolution. Norton, 2014)

Quote:

“They [four crusaders] are: Margaret Sanger, Gregory Pincus, Katharine McCormick and John Rock. All have been the subject of earlier books. Sanger has her place in history, with her lifelong fight for women’s rights, but why aren’t any of the others household names?

“Early in the 20th century she [Margaret Sager] ‘popularized the term “birth control” and almost single-handedly launched the movement for contraceptive rights in the United States. Women would never gain equality, she had argued, until they were freed from sexual servitude,’ [quoting the book] which included endless and exhausting childbearing. Sanger had opened the nation’s first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916.

“Gregory Pincus * * * failed to get tenure from Harvard * * * Born in 1903 and raised in a Jewish farming colony in New Jersey * * * As a biology professor [of course not a professor, for he did not get tenure] at Harvard he studied in vitro fertilization in rabbits and applied for a grant to study applying the process to humans. * * * For whatever reason, Harvard ousted him.
In 1944 he and a partner created the Worcester (Mass.) Foundation for Experimental Biology, a ramshackle operation where Pincus did his hormone research in a converted garage. He was working on the possibility that artificial progesterone doses could stop ovulation and therefore pregnancy in the way natural progesterone stops ovulation when a woman gets pregnant.

“Katharine McCormick, who would inherit much of the McCormick reaper fortune, earned a degree in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904. Soon, she was using her wealth to fund Sanger’s campaigns for women’s suffrage and birth control and, later, Pincus’s birth control pill. * * * Margaret Sanger got a letter from her old friend and supporter, Katharine McCormick, asking how she could use her money to support the development of contraceptives. Sanger told her about Pincus, whose work she knew through Planned Parenthood. McCormick went to Worcester to meet him.

“Meanwhile Pincus needed a medical doctor [to do clinical trials on his theory about progesterone], preferably a gynecologist, to help him find women as test subjects for progesterone. Having blamed his Harvard firing in part on anti-Semitism, he hesitated to bring another Jew into the project. He turned to John Rock, who looked like ‘a family physician from central casting.’ Better yet, he was a Catholic. * * * Another partner was the GD Searle pharmaceutical company. They quietly funded Pincus, and he quietly chose their synthetic progesterone over that of a rival.

choi

My comment:
(a) The review is too talkative. Thus there is no need to read the rest, other than the quotations above.
(b) fons et origo (n; Latin for “source and origin”)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fons%20et%20origo
(c) “New York’s Maxwell’s Plum, the mother church of singles bars”

Maxwell's Plum
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_Plum(1966-1988)
(d) “Orgasm for women would be known as the Big O. Cosmopolitan magazine became a guide to attaining it, with cover lines such as ‘Have You Tried the New Butterfly Position?’ (Warning: Do not attempt this without a chiropractor on call.)”

I fail to find out what kind of position it is.

(e)
(i) Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
(ii) History & Successes. Planned Parenthood, undated.
www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/history-successes

Quote: “Planned Parenthood dates its beginnings to 1916 when Sanger, her sister, and a friend open America's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. In Sanger's America, women cannot vote, sign contracts, have bank accounts, or divorce abusive husbands. They cannot control the number of children they have or obtain information about birth control, because in the 1870s a series of draconian measures, called the Comstock laws, made contraception illegal and declared information about family planning and contraception ‘obscene.’

(A) Planned Parenthood got THIS name in 1942.
(B) Comstock laws
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
(1873; named after its chief proponent, Anthony Comstock [who had not been a government official])
(C) “In Sanger's America, women cannot vote, sign contracts, have bank accounts, or divorce abusive husbands.”
* coverture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture
("Coverture was enshrined in the common law of England * * * coverture did not apply in Scotland")
* coverture (n; from Old French, from covert covered; see covert):
“(law) the condition or status of a married woman considered as being under the protection and influence of her husband”
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/coverture
(D) Griswold v Connecticut
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

choi

(f) Gregory Goodwin Pincus
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Goodwin_Pincus
(1903-1967; In 1944, [with Hudson Hoagland] Dr Pincus co-founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury [on the eastern border of City of Worcester], Massachusetts)
(i) Due to financial difficulties, the Foundation was taken over by University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1997. Wikipedia
(ii) Min Chueh CHANG 張明覺 (born in 1908 in [present-day] 山西省呂梁市嵐縣 敦厚村 -- 1991; 北京清華大學動物心理學學士學位 1933, PhD University of Cambridge 1941)

(g) Katharine McCormick
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_McCormick
(1875-1967; maiden name: Katharine Dexter; married to Stanley McCormick in 1904)
(h) GD Searle & Company
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._D._Searle_%26_Company
(1888-1985; founded by Gideon Daniel Searle; acquired by the Monsanto Company in 1985)