the Female Body GOVERNING

7
The Pill in Puerto Rico
and Mainland United States
Negotiating Discourses of Risk and Decolonization
LAURA BRIGGS
University of Arizona
In 1962, steroidal oral contraceptives—the various versions of
the Pill—were at the center of a major controversy, one that was to
have far-reaching effects. A growing number of reports cited bloodclot
problems among women taking the Pill, including a number of
fatalities. Some were calling for the Pill to be taken off the market. The
pharmaceutical companies, with the support of the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA), were hesitating and arguing that the evidence
linking the Pill with thromboembolism was merely circumstantial. They
undoubtedly had a strong fi nancial incentive to wait for more evidence;
in 1962 Searle pharmaceutical alone had sales of $56.6 million (Reed,
1983, p. 364). Physicians were split, with a minority suggesting that
the well-known carcinogenic risks of estrogen alongside the emergent
problems of an apparent correlation with thromboembolism argued
at least for extreme conservatism in prescribing the Pill. This state of
uncertainty persisted until 1975, when researchers agreed that a by then
considerably modifi ed pill was safe for healthy, nonsmoking women
younger than age 35.
This was a foundational moment for the women’s health movement
in the United States. The controversy over the Pill proved in retrospect
to be the beginning of the end of the unchallenged authority of physicians,
researchers, and the FDA to pronounce about women’s health.
Journalists, physicians, and patients wrote a series of books about the
unrecognized and unacknowledged dangers of the Pill, with titles such
as The Bitter Pill (Grant, 1985), Pregnancy as a Disease (Merkin, 1976),
and First, Do No Harm: A Dying Woman’s Battle Against the Physicians and
Drug Companies Who Misled Her About the Hazards of the Pill (Greenfield,
1976). Perhaps the best-known of these books was Barbara Seaman’s
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