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1.       "Even the "father" who could stake the strongest claim of deliberate paternity, a man named Gregory Pincus, didn't think of inventing a birth control pill until the arresting scheme was proposed to him by two women who had a clear vision of exactly what they wanted - a "perfect contraceptive" and who plunked down hard cash for producing it." page 6

2.       "Margaret Sanger at the age of thirty-four coined a radical and inflammatory expression - birth control - and went on to found the International Planned Parenthood Federation. In 1950, after turning seventy-one, Sanger, still in full battle dress, joined forces with seventy-five-year-old Katharine McCormick, and together they set out to enlist science in their bold quest for a contraceptive that could be swallowed. Within a decade after commissioning that minute technology, it was physically produced, field-tested for effectiveness and safety, and approved by government." pages 6-7

3.       "In a 1945 essay, Fuller Albright, an endocrinologist of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, proposed a term "birth control by hormone therapy." His thought became known in hindsight as Albright's Prophecy:

   Since preventing ovulation prevents pregnancy, one could employ the same principles on birth control. Thus, for example, if an individual took 1 milligram of diethylstilbesterol (synthetic estrogen) by mouth daily from the first day of her period for the next 6 week, she would not ovulate during the interval; if she wanted to continue the birth control further, she could continue the stilbesterol and take a course of progesterone to cause menstruation. One could juggle the above therapeutics to make the menstrual period come on the least undesirable day.

         Albright's Prophecy was brief and stated with extreme circumspection in an essay devoted mainly to the subject of serious menstrual disorders. In 1945, discussion of birth control by Harvard professor, even in a scientific framework, was politically unsafe. Under Massachusetts law, indeed, it could be a crime, punishable by jail. Just one year earlier, in 1944, Massachusetts voters had refused a proposal to relax the state's ban on disseminating birth control information." page 18

4.       "Indeed, in the late fifties, after the FDA approved the compound as a gynecological medicine, fully seventeen states had laws limiting the sale, distribution, or advertising of contraceptives. Connecticut outdid all the others making it a crime "to use any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception." Ironically, in Massachusetts, the state where the contraceptive pill was born, anti-birth control laws were the most restrictive, and that state would remain the last to repeal them, in March 1972. While it wan not illegal to use contraceptives, Massachusetts law made it a felony to "exhibit, sell prescribe, provide, or give out information about them." " page 160

5.       "Girls who became sexually mature in the years up to 1920 were not likely to have had premarital intercourse; only fourteen percent of these women informed Kinsey's researchers that they had not been virgins when they were married. But after World War I a sharp and dramatic change occurred. Among girls who became sexually mature during the period from 1920 through 1950, 36 percent - roughly four out of every eleven women - experienced premarital intercourse. It is a sobering thought that if there has been a sex revolution in recent times it was made, in fact, not by today's teenagers but by their grandmothers who are now past sixty years of age." " page 200

6.       After presenting a moving story about a Protestant convert to Catholicism, Dr. Anne Biezanek's early 1960s struggle with the morality of birth control after giving birth to 5 children while maintaining her medical practice,

   "In the quiet of the hospital she pondered the most challenging question of all, which she was later to unfold in a remarkable memoir, published in England: "Why should the needs of your soul force you to disrupt the lives of your whole family?" While tormented by the question, she received no visits from her spiritual director or pastor. That, she wrote, "was the worst part of the suffering that I then endured. I was standing out for what I had been taught to believe was a fundamental Catholic doctrine and hardly a Catholic I knew seemed interested. . . Until the reasoning that underlay my complaint is understood, the reason for the bitterness that is about to tear the whole Roman Catholic body will not be understood. . . . For this reason did I, in these bleak days, begin to see my personal dilemma as one that was bringing judgment day to the intellectuals of my church." " page 216

7.       "A British publisher asked Biezanek to explain her challenge in a book. The worked that resulted, All Things New, published in 1965, attracted a striking set of conflicting critical relations. In England, Father Alban Byron, a Jesuit, while differing with it in the Catholic Gazette, called it "the most extraordinary marriage book I have ever read." In the Clergy Review, Canon E. H. Drinkwater, a Catholic theologian, applauded the book for lacking "all those tactful euphemisms and soft-peddling, those delicate nuances and innuendoes, those discreet circumlocutions, which so often oil the chariot wheels of truth and which those of us who write under constant censorship get so good at." Canon Drinkwater added later in Search: "Let nobody imagine for a moment that the author is some kind of nagging eccentric or notoriety-seeker. . . . Here is a book in the same category as Newman's Apologia." page 223

8.       Noted John Rock's The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor's Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control (Rock lead the clinical studies of the pill) p. 227

9.       "Later, in answer to a student's question, Kennedy straddled, but more specifically: "I may be opposed to birth control as a member of my church, but I have no desire to impose my views on others." On television, a viewer challenged him: What if his archbishop confronted him with a straight-out directive? Kennedy answered that one flatly: "I simply would not obey." " page 233

10.       "In 1970 President Richard Nixon swung into the rhythm of the era by propounding a new "national goal": "adequate family-planning services within the next five years for all those who want them but cannot afford them." That goal reflected a sea change brought about by the Pill but also by a growing permissiveness in many areas of American life, concern over an explosive growth in welfare rolls, and the rise of the women's movement with its new focus on an individual's right to control her own fertility." page 234

11.       "On June 7, 1965, by a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court struck down the Connecticut birth control law in what The New York Times described on its first page as "a sweeping decision that established a new constitutional 'right of privacy.' " " page 241

12.       "Seven years after, on March 23, 1972, the Supreme Court further ruled that a state could not stand in the way of distributing contraceptives to single persons when married couples could legally obtain them. The decision came in knocking down the ninety-three-year-old Massachusetts law. This paved the way for a three-judge panel to declare unconstitutional a similar law in Wisconsin, the last remaining state to have one.       Another restrictive practice might have been interpreted as awed respect for birth control, but it too attracted outrage. In New York state, the National Organization for Women (NOW) protested a case of a married woman who was told by a bank that her income would be counted as dependable in a loan application only if she could prove she took the Pill regularly or had undergone a hysterectomy. When the woman offered proof of her husband's vasectomy, she was told that the proof was unsatisfactory. She could become pregnant through another male. In 1975, the federal government issued regulations aimed at eliminating such credit restrictions against women." page 242

13.       Regarding Vatican II: "In the end, Vatican II adjourned without settling the matter, but it broke historic ground. It approved a statement on marriage that elevated the role of sex as an expression of the love of spouses and acknowledged their right to limit the size of their families by "moral methods" of birth control." page 255

14.       A passage from the book by Dr. Anne Biezanek may be an apt eulogy to Gregory Pincus, as well as to Sanger and McCormick:

    "All honor is due to those . . . who many years ago saw birth control as preeminently a woman's problem, and devotes so much time and throughout and energy towards perfecting a technique that would remain easily handled, comfortable, reliable, and at all times within the control of the woman herself. Of all the great works that men have undertaken for women, [the Pill] must surely rank amongst the noblest. The work was instigated at a time when financial reward was very slight and the risks considerable. It was done in the teeth of social disapproval and in the teeth of great apathy o the part of the medical profession at large. The first men who devised those things at such risk to themselves must one day be named and honored by all women as "the instigators of the revolution." pages 320-321

          Their names are
    • Russell Marker - developed techniques to make cheap synthetic estrogens

    • Gregory Pincus - experimented with various drugs on animals to find the most promising combination

    • M. C. Chang - chief assistant to Pincus

    • John Rock - physician who undertook clinical trials

    • Margaret Sanger

    • Katherine McCormick (of International Harvester McCormick family) - funded research

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