The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the world’s first birth control bill – Enovid-10, manufactured by the G.D. Searle Company of Chicago, Illinois.
The development of “the pill”, as it became popular, was originally commissioned by birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger and funded by heiress Katherine McCormick. Sanger, who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in 1916, hoped to encourage the development of a more practical and effective alternative to the contraceptives that were in use at the time.
In the early 1950s, Gregory Pincus, biochemist at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, and John Rock, gynecologist at Harvard Medical School, started working on a birth control pill. Clinical tests of the pill, which used synthetic progesterone and estrogen to suppress ovulation in women, were launched in 1954. On May 9, 1960, the FDA approved the pill, granting greater reproductive freedom to American women.
