Contraceptive trials in Puerto Rico
The first large-scale human trial of the birth control pill was conducted by Gregory Pincus and John Rock in 1955 in Puerto Rico.
The Comstock Laws criminalized the use of the postal service as a means of sending, obtaining, or possessing items considered obscene or salacious (including books, pamphlets, abortifacients, anything used to "facilitate sex", or containing sexual language, etc.).
[3] Infuriated with the lengths that many were forced to go to in order to regulate their own fertility, women began to push for legal rights to contraceptive methods and to govern their own bodies.
The movement for public access to birth control started in the early 20th century, propelled by figures like Margaret Sanger.
[4] Sanger believed that a woman would never truly be free until she had the right to determine whether she wanted to be a mother, and acted on these beliefs by starting a campaign to educate women about sex.
Prior to the birth control movement, there was no uniform sexual education for women, and many found it difficult to find information regarding fertility and contraception.
Dr. John Rock and biologist Gregory Pincus, leading experts in fertility and hormone disorders in the United States at the time, collaborated in 1953 to develop an oral contraceptive.
[9] Around the same time, chemist Carl Djerassi demonstrated the synthesis of progesterone from a wild yam root found in Mexico.
The two biologists had proved that their contraceptive hormone treatment had prevented pregnancies in both rats and rabbits, and wanted to take the trial to human test subjects.
"[13]Katharine Dexter McCormick was an heiress and philanthropist who ended up funding a large part of the research surrounding the first oral contraceptive pill.
[16] Likewise, mainland social scientists at the time viewed the high rates of poverty and unemployment as being caused by reproduction, consequently putting the brunt of the blame on Puerto Rican women.
Such scientists, like J. Mayone Stycos, believed that Puerto Rican women's "sexual patterns ha[d] become fairly routinized and difficult to change," and thus needed to be heavily regulated.
Puerto Rico already contained multiple birth control clinics which were originally funded by the U.S. government under the New Deal programs.
"[16] Thus, the experiment provided lower income women what they believed was a desirable opportunity to control their fertility while also avoiding sterilization.
As one woman who participated in the trials described it, "[p]hysicians dispatched their assistants to rap on doors throughout the town's slums, telling women they didn't have to have another child if they took the pills regularly.
Marsh describes how one woman was 30 years old with ten children, and a husband that "drank heavily and insisted on daily intercourse, but claimed to be too sick to work."
[21] The women participating in the trial began to experience side effects, but their complaints were deemed unreliable and outright dismissed by researchers.
Some symptoms reported among patients included dizziness, vomiting, nausea, headache, and menstrual irregularities; some of which were so severe that they required hospitalizations.
[16] A small group of female medical students were also recruited to participate in the study, but dropped out due to similar symptoms despite being told that they would receive worse grades if they quit.
[22] After the trials in Puerto Rico, the drug was approved in the U.S. in 1957 for consumer use as a medication to treat severe menstrual side effects.
The original dosage from the trials was eventually dropped to 5 milligrams after severe side effects were observed, including nausea, dizziness, headaches, and blood clots, along with the death of three women in Puerto Rico.
Instead of having to deal with an accidental pregnancy, women were provided with the opportunity to delay having children, allowing them to pursue higher educational goals or seek employment.
In a 2006 review of Ana María García's 1982 film La Operación, Tamara Falicov noted that "Puerto Rico became an important testing ground for U.S. pharmaceutical companies working on the effectiveness of the birth control pill.
