the Female Body GOVERNING

The Pill in Puerto Rico and the Mainland United States 173
countries. Each group consisted of 200 to 300 women by 1957. Many
feminist scholars and activists, as well as popular writers, have argued
that the Puerto Rico trials were shoddily conducted in that they took
inappropriate risks with women’s health (Gordon, 1995; Marks, 1998;
Oudshoorn, 1994, pp. 122–132, Ramírez de Arellano & Seipp, 1983,
pp. 105–123). It might also be said that they failed on their own terms;
they neither lowered the birth rate among trial participants nor was
the Pill acceptable to the women who took it. Half the trial participants
in both groups dropped out, and a good percentage of these left the
trials because they found the side effects—severe headache, nausea,
vomiting, midcycle bleeding—too unpleasant and not worth the trouble. 6
Additionally, a signifi cant number of pregnancies occurred in both
groups. In the fi rst year and a half, among the 295 participants from
Río Piedras, 19 became pregnant—or a percentage of 14 per 100
woman-years of exposure. 7 Pincus (1958) misreported this in the text
of his article announcing the success of the pill, as fi ve pregnancies. He
acknowledges another 14 in a footnote.) Moreover, the pregnancy rate
among those who stopped using the Pill was 79% within 4 months, a very
high rate caused by the “rebound effect” of heightened fertility post-Pill
(Cook, Gamble, & Satterthwaite, 1961). All of this was close enough for
Pincus—the pregnancies during the study were explicable in terms of
pills missed, whether under orders from a physician to relieve side effects
or because of forgetfulness—and most occurred after women were no
longer enrolled in the study. Those who were truly miserable with side
effects quickly left the study. However, its real effect on the community
of women who took the Pill was a rate of side effects (including those so
severe as to require hospitalization) high enough that new recruitment
for the study became quite diffi cult (A. Satterthwaite to C. Gamble,
personal communication, Aprile 21, 1957), and a net increase in the
pregnancy rate.
The trials—and the Pill generally—have been criticized as an
example of male and masculinist science being callous about women’s
bodies, as we have seen (Seaman, 1969). But it bears underscoring
that the people most directly involved with running these trials were
women—and feminists. Sanger and McCormick supported and shepherded
the work of Pincus and his lab, even when PPFA dropped it.
Although Pincus was subsequently embraced by the medical community
and sharply criticized by feminists, where he sought sympathetic audiences
in the late 1950s is interesting. The first public venue in which
information about trials of a contraceptive pill was published was not
a scientific journal, but Ladies Home Journal (Maisel, 1957), and the
first conference at which they were presented was an annual PPFA