the pill

A half-sibling for Sally Draper? Not quite yet. In episode three of Mad Men season six, we find out that Megan Draper had a miscarriage after accidentally becoming pregnant. Megan explains she was careless with taking her pill while on vacation in Hawaii, in part due to the time change. Once she confesses the unintended pregnancy to Don, they have a family-planning conversation that would not seem out of place today. Thanks to the pill, which came out in 1960, married couples could time their families like never before, and women like Megan could continue to pursue a career after walking down the aisle — so long as they remembered to take it.

"Everyone knows what the pill is. It is a small object — yet its potential effect upon our society may be even more devastating than the nuclear bomb." So read "The Pill and the Teen-Age Girl," a Reader's Digest article by author Pearl S. Buck from 1968, the same year the current season of Mad Men is set. While many social conservatives blamed the pill for the promiscuity of young unmarried women, 10 years before the pill was approved, half of unmarried women were sexually active anyway. Elaine Tyler May, author of 2010's America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, argues that it's not clear how the pill impacted the sexual revolution, but it is certain it led to a revolution in marriage. In the '60s, it was extremely difficult to get a prescription for the pill if you were not married. Yes, some women worked around this by wearing fake engagement rings to the doctor's office, but in many states it was illegal to give the pill to unmarried women. By allowing married women — the vast majority of women who had access to the pill — to plan families around desired career or educational goals, May says, the true legacy of the pill was more equality in marriage.

As for abortion, it was illegal in New York and much of the country for the entire '60s. (New York state passed a law legalizing abortion in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade.) A pregnant woman could find a doctor to perform an abortion illegally, but that often came with dangerous risks. Thus, in the 1960s the pill was the safest and most effective way to plan families after marriage.

There's a new study out that gets more specific on how the pill impacts who you're attracted to — and it's bad news for your sex drive. According to the study, women on the pill choose uglier men who are worse at sex but better at long-term relationships.

The birth control pill evens out hormones and causes women to choose men who are more similar to them, a safer choice, and more "father" material. But while the relationships last longer, the women involved in the study were willing to put up with worse sex. Those who aren't on the pill may choose men who are more different than them, leading to a guy who may be great in bed but not good for them in the long run.

The researchers even go as far as to recommend you switch to condoms before marrying to insure he's still "the one," once the hormones wear off. "Choosing a non-hormonal barrier method of contraception for a few months before getting married might be one way for a woman to check or reassure herself that she's still attracted to her partner," says Craig Roberts of Stirling University, Scotland.

Since we've heard a lot about how the pill affects a woman's sex drive, it seems to me that it may be more about a woman perceiving the sex as bad than the mate actually being bad at sex. But it's really interesting (and a little scary) to see how your choice of birth control could dictate your relationship choices. Would you experiment with going off the pill to test your relationship chemistry?

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported on something I've heard before: taking the pill could change which guys turn you on.

Breaking down the intricacies of personal taste to basic science, evolutionary psychologists and biologists have produced studies demonstrating that a woman is attracted to the scent, or pheromones, of men who have different immune systems than she does, perhaps since children born to parents with differing immunities would be healthier. Studies have also shown that women are more attracted to masculine men while ovulating.

But new research suggests that these preferences disappear when a woman takes hormonal birth control. She no longer prefers masculine men, nor those with different immunities. One biological anthropologist looking into the impact of the pill at University College London explained her motive, "We just want to know what we're doing" by taking the pill . . . "If there is a risk it affects our romantic life and the health status of our children, we want to know."

If you met your mate while you were on the pill, does this make you question your compatibility, or do you think it's an oversimplification of love?

The FDA approved a new birth control this Fall that's identical to Yaz (made by the same company) with one difference: it contains folate, the prenatal must have for "women who are pregnant or plan to become pregnant."

It's called Beyaz, which sounds like a verb or a SFW way to write b*tch. Putting prenatal vitamins in birth control makes perfect sense from a public health standpoint. The Center for Disease Control estimates half of all pregnancies in the US are unplanned (though only 20 percent of those women are on the pill), and 50 to 70 percent of neural tube birth defects could be prevented if women took folate.

So while this all sounds great, a big step forward for women not planning their pregnancies, it doesn't particularly instill my confidence as a consumer. How do you feel about taking a pill prepared to fail?

The pill has celebrated its 50th birthday all year, but 1960 was not the year it entered the US market; it was the year the FDA approved it as a form of birth control.

It had been around throughout the '50s and prescribed to a suspiciously large number of women for "severe menstrual disorders." Yet nobody, not even The New York Times, publicly acknowledged its birth-controlling powers until 1957.

That was when three clergy men — a priest, a rabbi, and a minister — accidentally got it some press while arguing against its dangerous, off-label use of preventing pregnancy. Even then, when The New York Times reported it, it did not mention the brand name, Enovid, so it was not like women could run out and ask their doctors for it.

It wasn't until May 10, 1960, when the FDA approved Enovid as a contraceptive, that the Times finally called it what it was: the "first birth control pill."