A woman should be able to use it without her sexual partner’s knowledge. Sanger explained to Pincus her lifelong dream, an idea so outrageous as to seem magical: a cheap, simple birth-control method that would allow sex to be spontaneous - no risking mistakes in the heat of the moment. The scientist was Gregory Pincus, author of controversial attempts to breed rabbits in a Petri dish. The woman was Margaret Sanger, who had spent 40 years in a crusade to start the organization that became Planned Parenthood. The story begins in 1950, with a meeting one winter night “high above Park Avenue” between “an old woman who loved sex” and a scientist once compared in the press to Frankenstein. But it was, finally, rabbit progesterone that provided the key to safe, effective birth control, and thereby hangs a gripping tale, one that Jonathan Eig tells with suspense and panache in “The Birth of the Pill.” Kate Manning is the author of “My Notorious Life,” a novel about a 19th-century midwife.Ĭrocodile dung, weasel bone, beaver testicles: These are just three of the unlikely ingredients humans have used in attempts to prevent pregnancy over the centuries.
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