the Female Body GOVERNING

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Accordingly, there has been an increasing demand for a simple, easily
practiced, generally acceptable, inexpensive means of contraception.
Generally this demand has been for some easy medication. (p. E8)
Urging that in the wake of the atomic bomb, scientifi c research must take
responsibility for its social effects, Pincus (1965) wrote elsewhere that
biologist had a positive social responsibility to address “overpopulation.”
He called for biologists to form a Federation of Population Scientists
and to undertake further research on limiting fertility (Pincus, 1965,
pp. 6–9).
Perhaps the most dramatic example of the importance of the overpopulation
argument to research on the Pill is John Rock. A devout
Catholic, Rock was by all accounts a man for whom moral and ethical
considerations were paramount. Unlike Pincus, he never became
rich from the success of the Pill—he refused to invest in Searle stock
because he disliked the idea that people would think he had become
wealthy from risks taken with others’ bodies—and equally unlike
the former, he had no love of the role of maverick. Moreover, he was
known as a physician who was elaborately kind to his patients, had a
faithful following, and who as a researcher was particularly concerned
about side effects (McLaughlin, 1982, pp. 124–127). Not only did Rock
(1963) become involved in the Pill research, but in 1963, he published
a crusader’s book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposal to
End the Battle Over Birth Control. Addressed to the Catholic hierarchy
and laity, it argued that the population explosion had rendered the
Church’s opposition to birth control obsolete, and more, profoundly
wrong. He wrote:
Though the population problem daily grows more destructive of the
values to which all men aspire, action by some governments and by
the dominant international agencies is paralyzed mainly because
of the religious controversy over fertility control. As long as the
Catholic Church proscribes the methods of birth control known to
most effective, it is said, no public institution—of the United States or
the United Nations—will forthrightly tackle the population problem.
(p. 5)
In short, he provides an excellent study—not of the unethical handling
of the Pill trials—but precisely the opposite, of how global political
concerns made the Pill trials ethical for many North Americans and later,
for the burgeoning Puerto Rican middle class.