Contraceptive Pill Trials Begin in Puerto Rico

Date

1956

Category

Social & demographic

Region

Latin America (Puerto Rico)

Era

Contemporary

Significance

In April 1956 large-scale human trials of the first oral contraceptive pill began in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, a pivotal and ethically fraught step toward a drug that would reshape women's lives worldwide.

Led by biologist Gregory Pincus and gynecologist John Rock, the trials tested Enovid, a hormonal pill, on Puerto Rican women because the densely populated island had no anti-birth-control laws, an existing network of family-planning clinics, and officials who supported population control. Participants received doses far higher than modern pills, and roughly a fifth dropped out from severe side effects that researchers largely dismissed, a fact later central to debates about informed consent and the exploitation of poor, non-white women in medical research. Yet the trials produced the efficacy data that led the US Food and Drug Administration to approve Enovid as a contraceptive in 1960. The pill gave women unprecedented control over reproduction, helped ignite the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism, and transformed family life across much of the globe, even as its testing left a troubling legacy.

Empires active in 1956

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE – 1974 CE

Related social & demographic events

• The Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine
  1958–1962
• The AIDS Epidemic Is First Identified
  1981
• The COVID-19 pandemic
  11 March 2020
• Defiance Campaign Against Apartheid in South Africa
  1952
• FDA approves the oral contraceptive pill
  9 May 1960
• Sharpeville massacre
  21 March 1960

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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