Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20141201

Host i am here today with jonathan eig. This is such a wonderful book, the birth of the pill. I learned so much. It was exciting. You take this story, a lot of it is about medical merchandising and you make it incredibly exciting and im curious to know your previous books were about baseball. What made you the subject . Guest i didnt have it on my radar at all and ten or 12 years ago i heard a rabbi gives a sermon about the importance of thinking of yourself as a partner of god and being able to change the world but to the responsibility to think about how we can transform our existence. Think of how the Birth Control pill must have set out to create one of the most important inventions of all times but was completely fundamentally change human dynamics. I became really curious and it struck me as odd that anybody would have on their agenda the pill for the liberation of women, something i would control their fertility and when men were controlling the Drug Companies who did that so thats where the idea again curious and when i looked into it and know in franchising, no support, setting out to do something everybody told them was impossible so thats the part that really appealed to me at first. Host can you sketch out what life was like before the pill . Guest i think many people take it for granted before the 1960s when it became commonly used the options for contraception were limited. Abortion and abstinence, abortion was unsafe and abstinence was harder, easier said than done. And you have condoms and some options that were available for women that went to the doctors that they really had to go through men to get access to those keys and ineffective and inaccessible forms of contraception. So, the average family size was 3. 7 and women in the 1950s had eight or nine children. Women who are the equal of motherhood. The purpose was to be a vessel and options were limited so you didnt see the kind of opportunities they had to go to college or graduate school or start careers. It was a very different world and even things like as you point out in your book marital rape was not illegal or ground for divorce. Society was so different. So that was one factor turning that around but it was an important factor. Host until the 30s, disseminating information was illegal and so even though his methods, the condit and diaphragm are very hard to come by. You talk about how when men would follow Margaret Sanger to tell us the secret. What is the secret. Guest there must be a magical solution that they felt like they were prevented from getting that information because they would arrest people. She got arrested for just putting things in the mail and it wasnt in the 30s they remained on the books they were not always enforced but they remained until the 60s. Host in connecticut for ex ample from 1965 that struck down the wall that separates control would fail to meet in binary to couples that was illegal. Host and massachusetts as well until the late 60s and thats where they were doing this research. How do you test if it works even disseminating information about it is illegal. Host you structure it in an interesting way as the story of four people coming together to create. Can you walk us through who those people were and what their role in the development was . Guest it is a human drama. They were all rebels and they were all aware that they were throwing bombs and doing something incredibly risky and thats without ever delete either one of them, she had been saying that there ought to be a miracle tablet that would allow them to turn on and off the reproductive systems and shes very specific about what this should end tale. It has to be something they can keep in their purses that they dont know they are taking and when they are done taking it today can get pregnant again. Shes very specific about this, but they all had a folly that its the stuff of science fiction. The science isnt there and what the drug company will manufacture such a thing. What university is going to support this research but she keeps asking for years and decades every scientist is interested in this area. What can we do and finally she meets a guy who is one of the leading experts in the production. Hes been fired from harvard because he is too radical and he was experimenting with in vitro fertilization and they would have far more flexibility. Men might not even be necessary at all and that scared people tremendously. He couldnt find work anywhere say hes working out of a garage and start his own Foundation Going doortodoor asking people for donations. And he says i can do that for control if youve got the money and she is flabbergasted how is that possible. Its very simple in his mind that the woman already has a contraceptive in her body and its called progesterone and when you are pregnant you cant get pregnant again because progesterone is admitted and tells the body not to produce more. That is the simplest way that he explained to her and she says what will it take . A couple thousand dollars to get it started. But then sanger goes out and finds an ally and she finds the whole project. She is a wealthy heiress who left hundreds of millions of dollars into says do whatever it takes. She will build laboratories, she will write blank checks. He does need one more thing though it doctor that can treat women because he is a lab guy. One of the most respected fertility experts in the country and gets him to come along so now you have somebody that brings respectability to this end is catholic and willing to challenge the church and say sex is good for marriage. It shouldnt be just for reproduction. And these people on their own and of course others involved but this core group of people set out to do something that the taliban is in possible. Host i loved that they imported diaphragms from europe by having them sewn into dress is because it was easy goal to bring them in and she was a very creative person and of a tragic life because her husband was completely schizophrenic and she spent her life taking care of him and seeing that he was taken care of and it wasnt until she died when he was in her 70s that she was able to embark on this reproductive adventure. One thing that was fascinating as the two women in the story are both in their 70s and are playing such a major role. I wonder if you scampered them a little bit for you spend a little bit more time on because that was kind of the last decade of Margaret Sangers career that she was beginning to show dementia that she had been such an amazing force. Everybody says that shes one of the most important people in the century. They did say that i was allowed to. [laughter] she was a major thinker of womens liberation and wrote the definitive biography a wonderful book and people should read that along with your book. They said she was up there with me and Elizabeth Cady stanton was theorizing the independence that when men are not here to reproduce children or serve man or the subservient and the identity that is pretty much universal and still occurs and she is a very serious person and pleasure and a sex is part of that. Host i agree. She absolutely sees the pope can open up all of the possibility that its not freeing women to have more sex but she feels if this gets out it will change everything and shes right. Her vision is absolutely correct. From the storytelling standpoint of the only reason they end up feeling the spotlight. They are doing the work and understand the process of how to go from the brilliant idea and at the time that Birth Control is illegal you have been as guys that are testing the pill on the women who in many ways are there lab rats and you see the process by which to they get the Drug Companies to agree to help make this and the singer is pushing and pushing and mccormick is pushing and getting them involved as a graduate of mit. And they dont take the process over and turn it, but its really just i think from the standpoint of one singer hands this idea off they are the ones that carry the ball to the line. Host he had the cartoon of einstein and the nerve of a card shark. He was looking at inventing a cure for baldness. If it is in this that will be that. He started out as a very conservative catholic. In fact you say that he confessed so many when he was a teenager that the priest finally said you dont have to be so scrupulous. Stop bothering me so he was extremely conservative and saw sex as being primarily if not completely for reproduction, but he changes. Talk about that. Host guest he co he goes to work as a doctor and he becomes exposed in a way that most whatnot and becomes exposed to fertility issues in a way that most men would not and begins to have this great empathy. They are coming into his clinics with their eighth or ninth children and begging what can we do to stop this and the only option is a hysterectomy achieves reluctant to do in the severe cases that he has such great empathy for these women and it changes his view. It brings the couples closer together. Maybe its talking to these women but as a result of that he begins to question and remains a faithful catholic but begins to question whether it is possible and if theres one area is wrong and instead of just wrestling with about inwardly he decides to see what he can do about it. They try to convince them that they should embrace before getting approved. Host they had the idea that the way that it worked made it sort of like the rhythm method that the pope had approved of in 1930 and that opened up the door little bit to the idea that there was a workaround but it didnt work out. ~ all about that. It allowed you to regulate your cycle and you knew when it was safe to have sex which was pretty much all the time but in presenting that to the church which all of this is new to them and everybody and learning how hormones control the body and how they can change he argues to the vatican that they should think about this as an improvement on the rhythm method on the philosophy that a woman is able to know her safe period and if you know its safe than you should be able to have sex for pleasure. And the committee actually votes to endorse this idea that the pope said no. On the part of the church they are still doing it but not as intensely. The archbishop of new york said contraception was worse because of abortion destroys life but plays with the plan to create life and that is satanic. Its hard to work your mind around that because now even many people that are opposed to legal abortion would say okay Birth Control, not the Church Organizations they tend to oppose but its interesting to go back and see how strong. The sense that you get people thinking yes but weve already get condoms why to be the birthcontrol what good does that do. That is amazing. Host guest and they said the word is cultural. The key is that it gives women the control because at that point you can say the condom is great but women have no control over that and that was a big difference for her. If the church had approved the birthcontrol pill and had the line it might have made a big difference in terms of how much they stayed with them on these issues because most begins and follow and i have this one area that i can carve out but i do not that i do not observe or agree with and they turn out to be the advanced troops and start following his approach. Host said it was the big beginning of people in the cafeteria catholicism. I had a letter from someone who said im a catholic and i oppose abortion so i decided i have to use it for wait a minute here. You are missing something. So, did you have any idea going into this about the political feelings attached to the pill even today . Guest you cant miss it if you read the newspapers and watch the news and that was the incentive because it would be great for people to understand how we got here today and what it looked like before we had these options. We are still fighting over these things. Once the pill got out there they would see that it worked and that it changed the world and gave more opportunities and it made women healthier and reduced abortion. She thought the argument would be over and the fact that its not told you how strongly people feel about the issue and i dont think that its fair to keep fighting over the issues if you dont understand where weve come from. What do you think bothers most people what do you think is the reason they are bothered . Host is deeply rooted to be honest and purging the same way that men do that its okay to have sex for pleasure but not women. If you look at the root of my the roots of white birthcontrol is controversial its hard to avoid that just to build and bias. Host i agree with you completely theres also this idea as a kind of gatekeepers of sex that they are responsible for restraining men and if they cant, then too bad. But that is women can have sex whenever they want like men, then all hell breaks loose and everything falls apart. And we see that playing out now in the whole abstinence education. If a teenager has sex thats terrible. Most of the talk is about the girls. Itself about the women to control access. I am amused by the viagra ads that are nonstop when im watching football. And i try to imagine if there were ads for Birth Control that looked like viagra for men people would go crazy. There would be riots in the street. But for men its okay. Spank what is the story on the people and the separate bathtubs. What do they do guest thats the key i think. Host i just assumed that they were in the two tubs because they already had sex. Guest if you want to get into the other you have to take viagra. Host but its not a very good ad if that isnt clear somehow. Host lets see. The ethics of experimentation. Lets talk about how the pill was perceptive and brought to the market. I was very interested in how different the ethics of experimentation and testing drugs on the women was like a freeforall. They were fairly well within the standards of their day. And i mentioned a clear how do you test something that is illegal so they begin by testing it on the one the women that were seeking infertility. They said can we give them progesterone and see if its real he shuts down population and that was a little sneaky that the women were told this is something that might help them get pregnant when in fact it is something they strongly be weve helped them present getting pregnant. They tested it in the asylums in puerto rico where they needed more women and thats where they found hundreds but they were able to sign up, but the ethics were questionable at times. Host the first thing they tried to do to make the female medical students take that away and they they did and they would get bad grades in school but then they seem to have hit on women really want birthcontrol and women were following them around in the streets saying my husband wont use a condom. He thinks its fine. I will have as many children, and they were using sterilization of lot. They were begging for sterilization, and we remember that history mostly as the history of forced sterilization. Its in puerto rico and less successfully but there was another side of the tremendous demand. Guest they were offered sterilization after every childbirth. They were not forced but they were offered and they paid for most of of the stairs of nations. The average woman had seven children so when they heard there was a pill available whether they knew it was an experimental product or not it didnt matter. They began begging for it and lining up at the clinics and when the preachers would say we heard there is a new contraceptive remember the church doesnt allow this alliance would be longer than x. Days because it was like advertising. It was definitely demand. When they tried to force it on these nursing students they went into go for it because the side effects were so severe and they couldnt put up with terrible side effects but it was much higher than they needed to be. So when the pill was first marketed it wasnt marketed for Birth Control it was marketed as the regulation. Can you talk a little bit about that . The whole process of the revealed that this is what falls out . Guest they are having to fight doing things in ways that are surreptitious because there is no government or university supporting them, so they finally see that there is demand for this. They are getting hundreds of letters saying i heard that theres Research Going on in the birthcontrol pill 30th when can i get it and they see that they are able to take that drug company. They say its the ceo and owner of the company. Women are clamoring for this. Maybe you should take a chance on it. As for the agree to apply for permission to license the drug to get approved but they say we are not going to ask. We are going to call it the regulator of the cycle. So when they apply to the fda, they show them all this data that it really does regulate and they say yes it seems to regulate and they approve it. And it comes with a label warning that says it will prevent pregnancy. And this becomes even more advertising and the women now are going to their doctors saying that they need this because because the average of their cycles when in fact they need it because they want to not have a child and the doctors realize what it is and begin prescribing it off label as well. So now you have a groundswell building and the women are finding this tool even before its really labeled a tool that they are supposed to have and that makes a huge difference. And it was a couple of years later that finally they got permission to market. Guest a member of member told that he prescribed for the cycle about we both like to add to use but it also prevents pregnancy. And by then, hundreds of thousands will have already taken it and they had no reason to not approve it. Host you sort of compare and contrast the sweeping medication that was also supposed to prevent morning sickness that was widely used in europe and caused devastating birth defects and it was not marketed here because we had strict rules. But what was the relation of this terrible scandal scandal took to the development of the marketing of the pill and its approval . Guest doctors were giving up samples. When the fda began to notice that there were some problems that babies were being born with these deformities and at the same time the pill was within the approval process and i think that its the problems that have been discovered a year earlier it publicly would have stopped the development because when you think about it it was like nothing before created they were going to take it every day. It was in their hormones and it was for healthy young women it wasnt cured the disease or fix the element. This was something that a lot of women to control their lives that the standard would have been higher. They have taken it for six months or so and it was approved so it never would have gotten through after the problems became apparent. Host there are young women now that are rejecting the pill. Feminist women, the women that the leave in a quality and they find why should you take this for a moment. Theres the modern version of the rhythm method that is called natural family planning. Given all of the equipment that you need you have to look at the mucus every day and take your temperature but it just seems unnatural to be but rather do that what they consider to be risks and side effects. The reason that the pill has just totally inserted itself into American Life in such a big way is hard to find women who havent taken it that there is a reaction against it. Guest is a long study that shows women that are on the pill have fewer kinds of cancer and they live longer. So its an interesting dilemma that i understand if youre messing around with someone for moms it is an important issue. Host so we have this issue issue that turns out is just for lifestyle reasons but it also has benefits like device amandas prevents cancer, heart attacks, you live longer commission decreases your risk of death in childbirth and all kind of things that can go wrong so why cant it be smuggled into acceptability this is the primary effect of which is to make you healthy with a secondary benefit but that is of course not why youre doing it. Guest they are trying to compare to the rhythm method that says we have this new winning of health told that in addition to all of these other benefits that allows them to decide when they are ready to get pregnant and started their big catholic families which is really what the church wanted, they want that might have been a different argument and its all about how to frame these things and in the beginning they took their best shot at framing it and focused on the issues of the day which were population control and not sex or womens health. They got the best issue in terms of propaganda and gaining public support was population control. It doesnt have the kind of effect on that over the decades that they thought that it would but it was an Important Movement at the time and it is easy now. They couldnt have known that. Host most people dont know that now. We hear so much more about the possible dangers of the pill and side effects some of which you suggested were whats the word i want, psychosomatic. Guest the biggest argument they made it all the side effects especially when they were ramping the dosages up really high all of the potential dangers we may learn about are minuscule compared to the number of the women dying on unplanned and women being born into poverty. Of those are going to overwhelm any possible side effect of the drug and that is one of the important arguments they made when they were first bringing this on. Guest host its amazing that didnt carry more weight for example with religious objections. Even now that doesnt carry more weight. It should carry a lot more even today. Host people dont think anymore that it is a thing. Its 800 women a year in the United States on the record of the Maternal Mortality isnt that good compared to other countries. Guest you start to see these changes occurring really in just a couple of years of the approval. So no question about it in the something that we take for granted now. Host with talk about the social changes that the pill helped bring about. Talk about that. How do their lives change . Guest they push back the age of marriage and that they have their first children. They stay for four years and get a get a bachelors degrees and and by the mid60s on the cover of the Time Magazine there is a little bit in the story like whats going on here women are having sex on campus and its getting a little crazy out there but they also know women are waiting longer to have children, so people notice it almost instantly and its very rare to see that kind of cultural change happening so quickly. Maybe when you start having children that is really kind of the end of other possibilities. For instance think of the character in the buck her life seems so sad to me. Maybe it isnt to her. Guest is a brilliant woman sounded by these people hosting cocktail parties for all of the scientists who work as the Nobel Laureate and she can hang out with any of them in the conversation but theres nothing for her to accept bake casseroles and wait for her husband and the women in that kind of situation although for the country and all over the world the opportunities just were not there for them because as soon as they got married they got pregnant and if you didnt, people would begin to wonder what was wrong with you. That is the cultural norm. Host or if you only had one child or two children. And also its interesting about how fertility, it always attributed to the women. And john is someone that thought what if men have something to do with it and he would test semen. He was one of the people that have this thought so deeply ingrained is so deeply ingrained in the idea that everything about reproduction is all about the woman. Guest and womens rights were really defined by pregnancy or lack thereof. God forbid they got pregnant before they were married they were considered outcasts in society and if they didnt do have children they were considered a freak. So it allowed a lot more range of opportunities and choices. Host to put some of the social changes. Talk about that. Guest thats one kind of social change and then you start to see the revolution that is another kind of social change more casual they begin to rise during the 60s and you cant attribute all of death to the pill because it is purpose bigger revolution under way. But it is a part of it and it is a factor. Host there was a lot of demand but getting the divorce was difficult. You have to have grounds and hired a detective to find you. It is a tremendous load of hypocrisy that went on in the custody. Basically youre expected to stay buried. So once the law changed okay lets go for it. Guest they are seen as outcasts in society. Host i didnt understand that at all. Guest i think i was attributing it to certain critics. That brings about leaving things including the attitude toward pornography. Host you mentioned that it was only legalized quite recently. They kept it out for many decades and you say that reason is they would become promiscuous pornography, staying out all night, staying out with your friends, they are having a wildlife. So specifically the women being promiscuous. Guest the only approved after viagra got there. Women complained. It was hugely popular in japan and the devices were named for her because it was the first over there to spread the word and she was a hero. Host there was one that was named after her in the 30s i think. What was that . Guest i saw an advertisement for it and people thought any brand that was the singer would be identified that would give control over reproduction. Host even though it is the last decade of her life and she had lost control of most of the organizations that she had helped found command its interesting she always hated the name planned parenthood. She preferred much that she had invented. But she organized this huge conference in japan on the reproductive developments and she was in her late 70s and i just thought you know, as an older woman and she is still incredibly active we dont care about her but she was still very awkward. Guest they told the press that they were going to declare this new form of Birth Control that had discovered and it was going to be an oral contraceptive and this was going to change the world and they said you cant go over there weve only tested it on 40 women they always ran the headline and was confident this was going to work he said that weve got it even though it was foolish to cause now when it all over the world were writing to the doctors and saying when can we get it. Host i want to ask about something that you said earlier. He said hell havent really fulfilled its promise around the world. I think that would have been more true like 20 years ago but now we are seeing tremendous drops in places like latin america for example and asia is interesting because i used to have this idea people want to control their family size until everything is all modern. But then what youre finding in the countries like thailand or much of latin america is falling through the floor even before modernization really catches up. And that the only place where the birth rate is as high as it was before the pill or Subsaharan Africa or parts of the muslim world but not other parts the same as here. So it seems like it has been pretty successful and not everybody that wants it can get it even today. Guest there were problems with cost. They were able to make longacting forms of contraception that can be implanted and they basically work on the same hormones that were developed and they were much more effective and so expensive in parts of the world but they are much more effective and i do think of it that it could be the first 30 or 40 years that part of the dream was not really coming through but we are starting to see progress. Host although it may come late because of so many people its still going to be a long time after the global warming. Lets talk a little bit about the eugenics and parts of the Birth Control story. Guest they are often criticized for being a eugenicist and a racist and it has to be understood in the context he certainly said some said somethings that by todays standard of the reprehensible but she was a part of the movement at the time and part of the era eugenics was talked about widely at harvard and especially among the welltodo that it was something that was widely discussed and we would discourage those that we dont want. And as spring from the views but was also considered a part of the mainstream debate. By gaining allies including the Eugenics Movement and she was looking at the big picture. Host it is hard to put one back in the framework and i dont think that she was racist. I think that she was concerned about very poor people that were having an honest family is that they could take care of and the terrible effects of that. But she was actually close to two w. E. B. Du boise and Mary Beth Ewan and the Birth Control clinics in the south were staffed by black people and were not coercive. They wanted to control their fertility and we are at a loss on race and reproduction as one of the people that together the framework of the reproductive justice and in the way people are starting to think more about reproductive issues. She said black women have always seized the opportunity to control their fertility even more conservatively than white women sometimes. So i think that when people just go around racism they are reaching. Guest if you look at details of her life it is far more complicated and shes almost always on the side of helping women of all colors. Guest and she was progressive and other political areas and started out as a socialist and she always voted for norman thomas. Guest her whole family had issues with her mother having too many children she felt like and then she works on the Lower East Side and saw the irish and jewish families that have more children than they could handle and that was the push that launched her career. Guest coming down to the present day im curious of what you make of the reproductive medicine and control and one of the things that struck me is how do we think some of these things are. Like working on in vitro fertilization in the 30s and the iud turns out to be from the 20s. I wouldnt want one of those things. But still, we think of that as stateoftheart. So there is a long history that thats the latest because apple and google said that they would pay for a certain amount of employees. That would give women even more control. The test tubes and frivolous asian and things the New York Times reporting was really shocking are not completely sensationalized because he never did make a rabbit in a test tube but one of the things that was said was this will make it unnecessary. Now women will have all of the power. And im not quite sure why they thought that because if you made a baby in a test tube without a human body to be in, how would that give women all the power . It would just make trouble. Can you talk about the most recent developments like freezing your eggs . Guest they were working on the morning after pill and they passed that off. We havent moved that far. We are talking about a lot of the same issues that we were in the days of the work. And today coming you know, you really havent seen as many major breakthroughs i think in the contraception as would have been expected. The fact that we are still working on the same hormones in slightly different forms is surprising and there isnt that Much Research on the scientific and nobody is thinking as boldly as they were. People like the Gates Foundation funding a lot of research and looking for better ways to help the area that hasnt been reached as much. Theres Research Going on as you discussed on the welltodo women in the United States and europe and in the communities where there isnt that kind of money where options are still much more limited. Host do you know anything about the latest and can you tell us anything concrete about the latest scientific guest theres always been a talk about the options. They say its ten years out. And at the next ten years and ten years but there are some things that they are talking about that could work then that raises a big issue. Well they go for it . They dont have the same incentive because they dont have to worry. So if there is a new product county you market it in a way and one of the side effects of the filter doesnt get talked about much is that its cut them out of the discussion for the most part. If you look at their responsibility. It isnt the dialogue that they feel like it is an awkward subject for them to talk about. If it does come up with Better Options for men are they going to be ready for that and are they going to be willing to at least consider it . Guest host its interesting because they both felt the great thing about about the pill besides all the other great things is that it was one in a controlled and they could be taking it without the partner knowing a lot of men and didnt want their wives to have this control and they didnt care how many because it was just all on her. But its interesting that in that argument this is one in women controlled and men dont need to go about it. But paired with another argument i wouldnt trust a man to use it. Once they said they were using it and they werent. But why would they remember to take their pill. But i think thats changing as the men and women become a little better able to talk to each other about things and more a quality and its no fun for a man to have a baby at the wrong time. Guest the fact that women and men are on more equal footing today than they were these are discussions that couples could have together and should have together. We are dealing with it hitting better at it but as long as the responsibility hangs so heavy with the women they are still getting a bit of a pass. Host why is it soared to remember to take a pill, any pill. You talk a lot about in the book whats with what he is winning, they dont remember. And the wonderful die of pack was invented by a man that was frustrated and they kept forgetting it and they wrote a piece of paper with all of the dates and they put a pill on each date and then the paper so. They have trouble taking any kind of medication every day. Did i take it today, i dont remember. Guest we cant remember what we did this morning and thats why some people prefer the end plants, the long active host its unfortunately very expensive, and the Affordable Care act is a helpless act and its interesting that the people opposed to the provisions in the Affordable Care act and the no pay or control decisions often focus on these longacting methods because they really work. Is that the problem . Guest they said this shouldnt be connected, you dont have to take it right before coming you just take it every day and forget about it. But there is no stumbling and fumbling and weight in the heat of the moment i have to reach for my pill. She was insisting its something you take with your vitamin every day. When you think about it its brilliant to disconnect and it also helps to destigmatize it a little bit. Host this has been a wonderful discussion. Ive learned a lot. Your book is great and i wish you every success. Thanks for being here. Authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, Public Policy makers and others familiar with their material. After words airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p. M. On saturday, 12 and 9 p. M. On sunday and 12 am on monday. You can also