Talk:History of birth control

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2021 and 10 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Bellafelix01.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:26, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Testing the Pill

I removed the following inaccurate, misleading, unnecessary, U.S.-centric subsection added by:

00:24, 28 November 2013 Evangruiz (talk | contribs) (Information gathered from a documentary transcript titled The Pill)

Testing the Pill
When the birth control pill first emerged on the market, doctors told women to put all their faith on the pill despite the alarming side affects including but not limited to weight gain, mood swings, etc. Back then, women were given an alarming overdose of birth control compared to birth control pills today. Gregory Pincus aided in the development of the pill. He worked on decreasing the side affects of the pill. The new pill contained estrogen as to combat the heavy bleeding that they old pill caused. He tested the new pill on women in Puetro Rico even though they did not know that they were participating in an experiment. In addition, they were not informed of the possible side affects of the pill. Many people claimed that it would defeat the purpose of the experiment if the patients were told of the possible side affects of the pill because then they would develop these side effects. In time, women fought in congressional hearing panels for a warning of the side effects on the pill bottle.

that cited (and misinterpreted) a transcript of a ten-year-old American Experience documentary "The Pill" by English and Theatre major Chana Gazit.
The development of the Pill is described at length in the History section of the Combined oral contraceptive pill article. Lynn4 (talk) 18:07, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Testing

I removed the following inaccurate, misleading, U.S.-centric, WP:NPOV-violating section which was originally added as a new paragraph to the "Early history" subsection of the Birth control article:
• 23:27, 9 December 2014 Hellomsengineer (talk | contribs) m (→‎Early history: Adding information about the history of birth control)
and 27 minutes later moved to this article as a new section entitled "Testing":
• 23:54, 9 December 2014 Doc James (talk | contribs) (moved from main article on birth control)

Actual testing for the birth control pill began in Puerto Rico.
John Gunther from Inside Latin America states
"Puerto Rico has been a headache to the United States for 40 years…the overwhelming problem of Puerto Rico is the relation of population to the land."
In the Early 1940’s the United States felt Puerto Rico was overpopulated so something needed to be done about this issue.
Greg Pincus (first inventor of oral contraceptive along with John Rock) visited Puerto Rico and discovered it would be a perfect location for the human trials.
Puerto Rican women were experimented on and were put on these trials so that scientist would be able to try out their contraceptives.
According to an interview done by the Chicago Tribune, the women were told that,
"You have to do what’s best for you and your family. It’s not easy making a choice like that."
Puerto Rican women became guinea pigs for this so called "magic pill".
They were put through a lot of testing and suffered many side effects.
Laura Briggs, a Professor and chair of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst, say that this
"ought to alert us to the palpable concern present in the 1950's,
following the thalidomide tragedy (in which a tranquilizer prescribed for pregnant women had caused severe limb deformities in their offspring), about side effects.
Common sense dictated that caution was appropriate in giving steroidal compounds with powerful, systemic effects—many of which were unknown—to a population of healthy women."
From these test, many women became sterile, while other woman became more fertile (the opposite of what they wanted to achieve), many women died,
yet all of this was part of the "test process".

that cited (and went beyond and misquoted and misinterpreted) the following poor-quality sources:
• Briggs, Laura (2002). "Demon Mothers in the Social Laboratory: Development, Overpopulation, and 'the Pill,' 1940–1960" in Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 0520222555, pp. 109, 126, 129, 132.
• Klotz, Hilary ? (2003). "People & Events: The Puerto Rico Pill Trials". Boston: WGBH.
• Quintanilla, Ray (April 11, 2004). "Puerto Ricans recall being guinea pigs for 'magic pill'". Chicago Tribune, p. 19.

The "Demon Mothers" chapter in Laura Briggs 2002 book gives her opinions of—and a distorted, inaccurate, incomplete account of—the clinical trials of Enovid as a contraceptive in Puerto Rico, and is not a WP:NPOV source.
The blurb (by Asian Studies major Hilary Klotz ?) from the 2003 WGBH website that accompanied the eleven-year-old American Experience documentary "The Pill" by English and Theatre major Chana Gazit, is not a reliable source.
The 2004 anecdotal newspaper account by Ray Quintanilla of the foggy recollections—after five decades—of Puerto Rican women who recall participating in 1955 (when Nancy Cruz was 5 years old and Delia Mestre was 11 years old) in clinical trials that began two years later in April 1957—two months before Enovid was approved and marketed in the United States—is not a credible source.

The development of the Pill is described at length in the History section of the Combined oral contraceptive pill article, which uses many of the good secondary sources I listed a year ago in a discussion on the Talk:Mestranol/norethynodrel page.
Lynn4 (talk) 21:59, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:48, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

India?

QUOTE: South Asia Indians used a variety of birth control methods since ancient times, including a potion made of powdered palm leaf and red chalk, as well as pessaries made of honey, ghee, rock salt or the seeds of the palasa tree. A variety of birth control prescriptions, mainly made up of herbs and other plants, are listed in the 12th century Ratirahasya ("Secrets of Love") and in the 15th century Ananga Ranga ("The Stage of the God of Love").[10] END OF QUOTE

These kinds of words are total nonsense. There was no India in the time period mentioned. Moreover the writings Ratirahasya and Ananga Ranga may have no connection with the common peoples of the various regions in South Asia.

However, the information can be rewritten without any jingoism in a more reasonable manner. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2409:4073:21C:B0B2:70DE:86E3:A777:13DD (talk) 16:16, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Malthus

This article seriously mis-states Malthus's position. Malthus, an Anglican clergyman, was adamantly opposed to artificial birth control, which he condemned as "morally indefensible along with infanticide, abortion, and adultery". Malthus stated that only war and famine would reduce population, and he was pessimistic that even this would work to check the growth of populations, which he demonstrated had a fatal tendency to rapidly outrun resources. The remedy he proposed was self-control, i.e., chastity, within and outside of marriage. See (for example): S. Niyibizi, "Malthus, le malthusianisme, le planning familial et l'ONAPO" {"Malthus, malthusianism, family planning and ONAPO"}, Imbonezamuryango, 1991 Aug;(21):5-9. In French. (Summary)]. Malthus's opinion was the conventional one until the end of World War 2.