Pill brought us freedom but not more respect

It revolutionised sex, providing many joyful and regrettable freedoms, while letting men off the hook. Side effects also beg the question: where are the alternatives?

The contraceptive pill has undeniably been a service to women, lovers and feminism: for good and ill. Picture: News Corp

In 1996, when a link was found between breast cancer and the combined contraceptive pill, a progesterone-only “minipill” became common, and in 2007 another study said taking it for under eight years actually reduces your overall cancer risk. Now an Oxford study says that in fact all hormonal contraception - pill, patches, implants - actually do increase the risk of breast cancer by a quarter. But hang on: at the same time it gives protection from two other cancers. And to put the lid on it, sisters, the negative effect is similar to having “two alcoholic drinks a day”.

It is the job of medical science to record this stuff, but I sense a widespread “meh!” greeting it. Percentage rises from a small base are not all that alarming, and every week we are warned of another carcinogen: suntans, salami, smoking, booze, barbecues, the very air we breathe. Women also know that among the most dangerous things we go through are pregnancy and birth, and have long been resigned to side-effects.

Ah, those side-effects! If from a peak in the 1970s the proportion of fertile women on the daily pill has fallen a bit, it is not from terror of cancer. Many thankfully give it up once their sexual activity is channelled into one long-term relationship, thus more predictable. Others have an eco-minded revulsion against dosing a healthy body and flushing oestrogen into watercourses to confuse the fish. Some pack it in after a weight gain, mood change or rise in blood pressure; a few observant Catholics resort to the cyclical method known as Vatican Roulette. I was 18 when Pope Paul VI reiterated the ban on all contraception (the progressive nuns who taught me were shocked, few expected it).

Six decades of the pill has changed wider social mores. Picture: News Corp

The unhappiness it caused drove many of us from that church and tormented others: I knew one young Catholic wife who simply went to confession for absolution at the start of the prescribed routine monthly week-long break, and sighingly resigned herself to being a sinner for three weeks a month. Theologians would wince at her lack of “firm purpose of amendment”, but it kept her family affordable. Few had the insouciant courage of Victoria Gillick, mother of ten, who scornfully said she and her husband wouldn’t “sterilise their healthy bodies with bits of rubber or chemicals”.

But such headlong refusers are rare, and it is worth thinking about how six decades of the pill changed wider social mores. It has undeniably been a service to women, lovers and feminism: for good and ill, attitudes adjusted around it as they do in any industrial revolution, from the spinning jenny to the internet.

Actor Ellen Page as pregnant teenager Juno MacGuff in the film Juno. In my early twenties it became easy to get the pill- when a strong social current ran against single motherhood, writes Libby Purves. Picture: News Corp

In my early twenties it became easy to get, after a prim period when clinics wanted you to be married or engaged - a strong social and official current still ran against single motherhood. I remember feeling insulted when, already a working adult, I was warned it took a fortnight to kick in and given a large, unsolicited box of free condoms. The implication was that without this freebie I would, irresponsibly or helplessly, land a baby on the welfare budget. This sense that young women had little or no agency ran, ironically, alongside the parallel idea that any unwanted pregnancy was entirely their fault.

It may seem hard for today’s free spirits to grasp just how dreaded in my mother’s generation was an undesired positive test, and how that hung over into mine. The apology for forced adoptions - right up to 1976 - has lately unveiled some of that, but even with financial capability single motherhood carried a stigma. Eyebrows were raised, imputations drawn.

Given the side-effects, it’s worth wondering why globally few resources go into looking for non-hormonal alternatives. Picture: News Corp

Abortion was possible after 1967 but surrounded by scandal and doctorly doublethink. Novels of the period (such as early Jilly Coopers) record the sort of experienced older boyfriend who thinks his job done if he pays for the clinic. In my student years I watched young men start to presume that you’d be “sorted": invulnerable. Some single girls started the pill just in case they found a boyfriend and he wouldn’t wait that first fortnight. A few mothers marched their virgin daughters to the doctor at 16 as a matter of course.

These attitudes were brand new. For young men it relieved the terror of the shotgun marriage, angry father and affiliation order: if the silly girl hadn’t had her body chemistry altered in preparation for sexual surrender it was - once again - seen as her fault. You need not be a feminist to notice how well all this served the idea of young women’s bodies as a resource, with a duty to be available. It’s not hard to connect that idea to the advance of pornography, now digitally supercharged by another revolution.

While headlong refusers are rare, some have an eco-minded revulsion against dosing a healthy body. Picture: News Corp

Of course, a newer feminism emphasises the right of women to acknowledge and enjoy their sexuality, but even that can tip over into a bossily imposed duty: accusations of timidity or frigidity get levelled at girls who think only a close, loving commitment justifies full intercourse. Older women are damned as prudes if they flinch at memoirs and fictions suggesting sex with a total stranger after one Tinder swipe or drunken Freshers’ disco is just a laughable mistake. The fear of sexually transmitted diseases after Aids put a brief brake on that culture, but it remains embedded. As do the diseases.

So thank the clever hormonal interferences for many freedoms, both joyful and regrettable; they gave women choice and professional opportunities though not necessarily more respect. And given the side-effects, it’s worth wondering why globally few resources go into looking for non-hormonal alternatives. As so often with women’s matters, both in medicine and male opportunity the sense of “job done” endures.

The Times