Puzzle No. 12: When?

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.

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