HEALTH × SOCIETY

The Contraceptive Pill

1960 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In May 1960, the United States approved the first contraceptive pill, Enovid, the first drug licensed to prevent a condition that is not a disease.

Combined oral contraception is approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in May 1960, under the name Enovid: it is the first drug licensed to prevent a condition that is not a disease. Its mechanism is imitative. The product supplies continuously the hormones the body secretes when already pregnant; the ovary, receiving that signal, releases no egg. Hormonal contraception therefore opposes no process, it reproduces a physiological state. The social and economic effects of its diffusion are among the best documented in the social sciences: in the United States, where unmarried women obtained legal access, the age at first birth and at first marriage rose, female enrolment in long professional training increased, and women's paid employment grew in numbers as in hours.

Why it matters

The method reliably dissociates fertility from sexuality and places its control with the person who bears its physiological consequences. Work in economics attributes to this diffusion a fall in the opportunity cost of long study for women, a measurable factor in their entry into the medical, legal and business professions. More than a hundred million women today use derivatives of this product.

Dating & uncertainty

Approval as a contraceptive dates from May 1960. The measured social effects are later and uneven: diffusion is rapid among married women, later among unmarried women, from the end of the 1960s, as American states lowered the age of majority. It is this legal heterogeneity that allowed the effect on careers and marriage to be statistically isolated.

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:4118.1 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day