Female Medical Students In Puerto Rico Were Threatened With Expulsion If They Did Not Participate In Initial Research Trials Of The Pill
Rummage through the bottom of a random woman’s purse, check out her nightstand, or behind her bathroom cabinet mirror, and there’s a high chance you’ll come across a plastic circular dial containing her birth control pills. Today, the pill is used by over 100 million women across the globe, including 11 million women in the United States.
For liberal women, the pill’s narrative has been one of radicalism and celebration.
The fight for women’s reproductive rights, namely the right for a woman’s access to birth control, has dominated the feminist agenda for decades and practically become its crest.
But long before the pill became a symbol of economic and physical freedom or even a marketing angle for white women…
The scientists behind the little tablet were using it to push their own agendas.
Ironically, that agenda was partially based on eugenics and the sterilization of Puerto Rican Women.
After scientists hit a series of walls with the contraceptive pill, Puerto Rico became an ideal setting for scientific trials.
The four pioneers of the pill included the mother of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger.
Biologist Gregory Pincus, and Catholic gynecologist John Rock also were involved, but the team initially came across various roadblocks.
Getting clinical trials off the ground in the U.S. was difficult.
In most states, contraception was still illegal and many of the women who did take part in initial studies dropped out because of the severe side effects.
Most of these side effects included bloating, life-threatening blood clots, mood changes, and depression.
Stumped on how to progress in the U.S., the team soon shipped their research to Puerto Rico, where birth control restrictions and anti-abortion laws were nonexistent.
Access to contraception was largely due to concern of overpopulation on the island.
Birth control access was blocked from women in the United States. Pincus and Rock were confident they’d be able to get women on the island to participate in their trial and believed they would jump at the chance to take part.
Convincing them proved to be the opposite, however.
Many of the women dropped out of the study because of the intolerable side effects, leading researchers to begin looking for women they could pressure into participating.
Eventually, they began to sign up female medical students in San Juan.
They forced women’s hands by threatening their ability to participate in their medical programs.
It came down to two options for them: Stay and take part in the study, and they could get their degrees. Oppose and they could be expelled.
Each month, students faced grueling tests.
Tissue was collected from their uteruses and some participants underwent laparotomies – surgical procedures that include large incisions that would expose their abdominal cavity for research.
Once the researchers felt they’d obtained sufficient data, they moved onto their field studies.
San Juan’s Rio Piers neighborhood, a community that consisted of a public housing development for farm laborers, became their target. Of these communities, one collaborating researcher wrote in his notes that “families selected were landless” and considered “to some extent [to be] social problems.”
Gabriela Soto Laveaga, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, admits this practice was a cultural norm for research.
“The regulations were more lax, but also you had this belief that some people could be experimented on: the ‘feeble-minded,’ people of color, the poor,” she tells The Crimson.
Soon enough, researchers had recruited 265 unwitting guinea pigs.
They were women who had been informed of what the pill could do but not of its side effects or that they were participants in a clinical trial.
But similar to their previous studies, researchers struggled to keep participants on the pill.
In their paper on the trial, Pincus and Rock revealed that 22 percent of the women involved dropped out because of the pill’s severe side effects. What’s more, three deaths were reported. The women’s bodies were never autopsied or observed to see if the experimental pill correlated to their death.
Despite their findings, the researchers continued to further their studies in Puerto Rico.
As well as other areas populated by people of color, including Haiti and Mexico.
In 1959, the team pushed for the FDA’s approval of the pill as a contraceptive drug.
Soon after the Harvard scientists shipped out and headed back to Massachusetts, the trial’s pill, packaged as Enovid, hit pharmacies.
After months of enduring the trial’s invasive procedures and painful side effects…
Most of the women who participated were denied the very drug they helped pioneer.
The free pill that they had been given during the trial skyrocketed to $11 a month.
It was a price far out of their reach.
To this day, women in Puerto Rico are reluctant to harness the power of the pill.
In the most recent survey of contraceptive use in Puerto Rico, 46 percent of women aged 18 to 44 reported being sterilized.
In 2008, a survey concluded that 65.5 percent of the island’s pregnancies had not been planned.\
More than 60 years after its creation, many women in Puerto Rico still struggle to grasp on to the benefits of the pill. What’s more, the women that took part in those trials largely remain swept under the rug in the pill’s historical celebrations.
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