History of Birth Control
Crystal Dorrian
Birth control has always been a hot topic since it was first approved in the 1960’s and it works by either preventing ovulation or preventing fertilization. In the article “How the PILL Became a LIFESTYLE DRUG: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Birth Control in the United States since 1960” Include first name Watkins goes through the history of the birth control and pharmaceutical industries’ hand in it. Intrauterine devices (IUD’s) were available as early as the 1960’s and were an improved idea from the 1920’s hormonal contraception. As science and time have advanced, there have been new ways of delivering hormones, for example the patch or the shot. However, the idea behind birth control, changing hormones, has remained relatively the same since the 1960’s and 70’s.
The same article from above explains how, Carl Djerassi accused this fixed idea of changing hormones to the decline of drug firms perusing birth control. Little has changed in that development even though the pharmaceutical industry is doing very well. Djerassi gave three reasons for the pharmaceutical industries pull from birth control: the expense of toxicology tests required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the negative media the pill acquired after Senator Gaylord Nelson questioned its safety, and how American society rushes to court to seek compensation when drugs cause health issues (Watkins 1463).
Although the process of how birth control works has not changed, what has changed is the marketing aspect. From 1960 to 1980 birth control was advertised as just that, to control birth. It wasn’t until later that birth control advertising focused on the benefits of women planning when to have children. Yet pharmaceuticals companies never marketed toward birth control bring beneficial to the public health even though the World Health Organization recognized the pill as “essential medicine”. In the 1990’s pharmaceutical companies started branding birth control as a “lifestyle” drug, meaning that birth control was labeled as a drug to improve one’s lifestyle by treating less serious conditions (1463) . In the article “The Pill at Fifty: How the New York Times Covered the Birth Control Pill, 1960–2010”, Kruvand explained that “the news media have traditionally been the primary source of information on science and technology for the public (38)” and how the American public has shown interest in scientific discoveries. Birth control, more specifically “the pill”, was no different.
Watkins talked about how in the 1970s, the World Health Organization also took into account the idea of a male contraceptive and began research, but since then no male contraceptive has been created (1464). Although the latex condoms, as we know them today, have become a popular birth control method compared to “the pill”, especially in the 1980’s when the AIDs scare had come into play but was still less effective than the hormonal methods of birth control (1467). In 1984 the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984, also known as the “Hatch Waxman Act,” set up the system we know today for drug approval and regulation (1468).
In 2007, 90 brands of contraception were on the market in the United States. Today, there are at least 17 kinds of birth control and many different brands. The newest form of birth control has come from our rise in technology. An article published by the Smithsonian Institution, “Natural Cycles” is a European app that is making headway in the United States. “Natural Cycles’” design is to track a woman’s fertility window, and it is only one of many different apps being created to track when a woman is most likely to ovulate. However, these apps are still in testing it is recommended to use a birth control method that is more consistent and more accurate than these apps.
Sources:
“What’s Actually New About Today’s Newfangled Birth Control Apps?”
Watkins, Elizabeth Siegel. “How the PILL Became a LIFESTYLE DRUG: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Birth Control in the United States since 1960.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 102, no. 8, Aug. 2012, pp. 1462–1472. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2105/AJPH.2012.300706.
“The Pill at Fifty: How the New York Times Covered the Birth Control Pill, 1960–2010.”
