Tuesday, May 09, 2006

A day that will live in infamy

This Day in History: May 9, 1960:

Here's how the History Channel puts it:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the world's first commercially produced birth-control bill--Enovid-10, made by the G.D. Searle Company of Chicago, Illinois.

Development of "the pill," as it became popularly known, was initially commissioned by birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger and funded by heiress Katherine McCormick. Sanger, who opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States in 1916, hoped to encourage the development of a more practical and effective alternative to contraceptives that were in use at the time.

(Thereby making it even easier to "control the population" of undesirables...like blacks and mentally ill folks.)

In the early 1950s, Gregory Pincus, a biochemist at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, and John Rock, a gynecologist at Harvard Medical School, began work on a birth-control pill. Clinical tests of the pill, which used synthetic progesterone and estrogen to repress ovulation in women, were initiated in 1954. On May 9, 1960, the FDA approved the pill, granting greater reproductive freedom to American women.

(Hey, let's not forget American men! "The Pill" — along with abortion — are among the greatests gifts selfish men could ask for.)

Not incidently, thanks to — and prayers for — the good folks who held a Rosary Vigil today at the former Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology (now called the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research) for the twelfth consecutive year.