Every Child Should Be a Wanted Child

The first half of 20th Century America was indeed an exciting time in history! We saw in a span of just 50 years wars going from being fought on the ground by massed infantry to decisive campaigns waged in the air. Automobile ownership was no longer just a luxury of the elite class, but also of the working class. Mass communication could be viewed on a television, no longer limited to the radio. Many fatal illnesses and diseases found treatments and cures – all due to a rapid progression in science and technology. Coincidentally, it wasn’t just science that was changing the face of America, it was the faces of America that were changing America. In the same fifty years, women of America broke through social restrictions and began to demand an equal place among men in society. In large part, the catalyst for this movement was the fight for, and subsequent acceptance of the birth control pill. It seems fitting, then, that Elaine Tyler May released her book, America and the Pill, A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, on the semi-centennial anniversary of the FDA’s approval of the oral contraceptive.

I think that May set out in her book to illustrate how valuable the fight to legalize the oral contraceptive (“the pill”) was in creating independence and ownership for women of their own lives and bodies. This campaign for women’s power should not be confused with that fought for during the Feminist Movement, although they occurred concurrently. Margaret Sanger spearheaded the fight for the pill, and did so through two world wars and one cold war – during a time of widespread poverty and global overpopulation. The effort to legalize the pill began as a way to provide women with the ability to have control over the size of their f...

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...e where it belongs – on men” (Tone, 246). The social landscape at this point in America seems to be a stark contrast from where women were when Sanger and McCormick began their fight. In fact, Sanger and McCorkmick were adamant that contraception be entirely in the hands of women (May, 109). The whole purpose was to provide women with the ability to decide when and if they wanted to conceive, and that they should otherwise have a safe and effective means to prevent it. Women had come along so far in their right to be heard that what the pill had done to liberate them and give them control of their bodies was no longer enough in and of itself – it should be men who suffer the side effects just as much, if not more than they. It certainly wasn’t for a lack of effort; a safe, non-permanent male contraceptive was researched and tested quite extensively, but to no avail.