the Female Body GOVERNING

The Pill in Puerto Rico and the Mainland United States 169
The Science and Clinical Trials of the Pill
In Puerto Rico, the road to the clinical trials was inaugurated with
the founding of the Population Association and its transformation into
Pro Familia, groups composed mostly of women that operated within
the tradition of feminism that believed strongly in modernization,
technology, and science as a road to social progress. On the continent,
the project was launched in a similar way: Margaret Sanger, champion
since the Progressive Era of technology as the means of better contraception,
guided heiress Katherine Dexter McCormick toward funding
endocrinological research on hormonal contraception. In 1951, at
Sanger’s urging, Gregory Pincus, already known for unconventional,
radical work in reproductive biology (he had lost his appointment at
Harvard University following his well-publicized claim to have induced
parthenogenesis in rabbits) began work on hormonal contraceptives
under a small grant from PPFA. In 1953, McCormick took over the
funding of his work, and even as PPFA lost interest, began to fund
it as extensively as Pincus could fi nd use for the money (Reed, 1978,
pp. 340–341). After leaving Harvard, Pincus had struggled for funding
for his Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology; he worked for
numerous funders, including Searle pharmaceutical, the Rockefeller
Foundation, and PPFA—a biological entrepreneur par excellence (Reed,
1978, pp. 343–354; Vaughan, 1970, pp. 26–28). With McCormick’s
interest, however, hormonal contraceptive research became lucrative
as well as an appealing line of work for addressing the social problems
of the developing world.
For Rock, Pincus, and the teams they directed, conducting clinical
trials of the Pill in Puerto Rico simply made sense. In the popular
press and the development literature, Puerto Rico had become a kind
of poster child for overpopulation, which is to say, a classic example
of the precise problem their science was meant to solve. 2 Moreover, as
Gamble had shown in years of research on spermicides, Puerto Rico had
many well-trained physicians and researchers who were experienced in
birth control clinical trials. Perhaps most importantly, Rock, Pincus,
and their sponsors at Searle found on the island many like-minded
people, very concerned about “overpopulation” who were prepared to
go to considerable lengths to secure “strong” contraception. The physicians
and organizations that conducted the research and compiled the
results—Doctors Edris Rice-Wray and Adaline Pendleton Satterthwaite,
the Asociación Puertorriqueña Pro Bienestar de la Familia, and Gamble
himself—all articulated their support for the testing of the Pill in terms