Why a book about birth control?

Why a book about birth control?

I get that a lot.

It’s a fair question. After all, my first three books were about Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, and Al Capone. Birth control is not exactly the obvious follow up.

I could explain it with a joke. I could tell you that I’m following the old maxim, write about what you know, which in my case would mean sports, violence, and sex. But that wouldn’t be true. Or funny.

I could tell you that I believe strongly that a woman has the right to control her own body and that I was fascinated by the story of how women first began to grasp that control fifty years ago with the invention of the pill. That would be true. But it wouldn’t explain the real reason I wanted to write this book.

In the months ahead, I’ll use this blog to tell you more about why I pursued this story and how I went about reporting and writing the The Birth of the Pill. For now, here’s the capsule version.

First, my wife made the brilliant observation that women buy more books than men. She went on to suggest that I should try writing a book that might appeal to this larger audience. But even after deciding that I would try to follow my wife’s advice, which I always do, I had to figure out where to start.

Almost accidentally, I came across the story of Gregory Goodwin Pincus, the inventor of the birth-control pill. I remembered reading a story in 1999 in The Economist that called the pill the most important invention of the twentieth century—bigger than the atomic bomb, the airplane, the Internet…even bigger than the stuffed-crust pizza. I was curious (always a good sign): If the pill was so important, why wasn’t Gregory Pincus famous?

I began doing research, and the story I found blew me away. Pincus was fired from Harvard in the 1930s because his ideas were too radical, his style too bold. He was working out of a garage, practically destitute, when he happened to meet Margaret Sanger, an aging radical who had dreamed for more than forty years of a birth-control pill that would permit women to take more pleasure in sex and let them choose when or if they wanted to get pregnant. Every scientist Sanger ever spoke to told her such a pill would be impossible. Science wasn’t ready. Society certainly wasn’t ready. Birth control, after all, was illegal at the time.

Pincus had nothing to lose, and he had an idea that making a pill wasn’t going to be as difficult as other scientists believed. If you’ve got the money, he told Sanger, I’ll make you a pill.

And so it began—one of the most unlikely and miraculous quests in the history of science. I like to tell my sports fan friends to think of it as Rocky with a lot more menstruation. It’s a joke, but only partly, because, honestly, I think this is one of greatest underdog stories ever told. You’d certainly be had pressed to find one with a greater impact.

Gregory Pincus was asked once why he invented the pill.

His answer: because a woman asked me to.

I can relate to that.