the times | Monday December 6 2021 27
Comment
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826The pill is a blessing but all blessings are mixed
Women’s lives were transformed for the better by the ‘miracle’ contraceptive but we have paid a price for that freedom
or forgot her pills on a weekend
away, she was the irresponsible one.
Not his job to check. The fact that
chemical contraception is a physical
invasion, with possible side effects
from bloating and depression to
thrombosis, was ignored in the first
excitement and often still is. Most
women have either experienced or
known in friends a startlingly urgent
medical moment of being told to
stop taking it immediately.
Moreover, regarding full sex as not
necessarily a likely route to
parenthood (or an affiliation order)
has certainly increased the
pornification of women and the
normalisation of sex work, with its
idea that female bodies are just
decorative recreational facilities for
men. When you read in the
American Journal of Psychology
apropos side effects that taking the
pill doubles suicidality in adolescents
of 15 to 19, you can’t help wondering
if this is chemical or just because
early sexual activity is emotionally
risky and potentially exploitative.
None of this makes the pill a
villain, any more than the internal
combustion engine or the internet.
But with each of them we need to
think about the effect and assess it.
And, without absurdly fusty
nostalgia, wonder if there are habits
of thought and action we might
salvage from earlier times to dust off
and reconsider.uncoupling of sex from reproduction
and therefore detached it to a great
extent from responsibility. There
used to be a common joke in my
mother’s time: if a man accidentally
brushed or stumbled past you, a girl
could flippantly chirp “You’ll have to
marry me now!”. That now feels as
distant as the Rosetta Stone.
Of course history is full of casual
impregnations and betrayals but ours
is the first period to make it easy to
regard intercourse as purelyrecreational, incurring no particular
responsibility any more than a quick
swim or a trip to the gym. In some
cases — think of the terrible incel
men — it is even talked of as a
universal right (the one silver lining
in this may be that heterosexuals’
acceptance that sex can be just fun
and closeness, not reproductive,
made it easier for society to accept
gay love).
For women, release from old risks
and unwanted pregnancy is a
blessing but can also be a mixed one.
I can remember how fast from the
late 1960s onwards young men
started expecting that the girl would
be “fixed up”, and that if she wasn’t,13 per cent over six years. It still leads
the pack, though there is a rise in
long-acting methods such as IUDs or
injections. Anecdotally, many
women whose sexual partnership is
stable and who are not economically
terrified of pregnancy are getting
reluctant: why mess about with
natural hormone levels for decades
in an age of organics and clean
eating? Many return thankfully to
simpler barrier methods and bear the
risk of “surprises”.
For many the pill was a miracle. For
students or first-job recruits it took
away the frozen fear of unwanted
pregnancy or sad terminations. It
enabled couples to plan, empowering
decisions about timing and size of
family. It advanced women’s careers
(international research shows that
women with access to it earn more
by age 40). It has undoubtedly made
more babies wanted and treasured,
to the point that now they are more
likely to be treated as status symbols,
even luxuries, rather than objects of
comic dismay and social disruption.
It delayed the age of first
motherhood for many: 30 or older all
across Europe (it is ten years
younger in Africa). Knock-on effects
from that are later marriage and
commitment, and the anxious rise of
fertility treatment.
Another immense change, though,
is that without question the ease and
reliability of the pill accelerated theW
e trumpet big social
changes: claim that
the pandemic has
brought a new
ruralism and the
death knell for offices, or blame the
internet for all human nastiness.
Some days everything is declared to
be a pivot. But one anniversary
stands higher than most. The
introduction of oral contraception
was, to sexual behaviour and
expectations, what the Industrial
Revolution was to manufacturing
and urbanisation. “The pill” came of
age 60 years ago, and is worth
reflecting on.
After the first UK trials and
American experience it was
cautiously introduced on the NHS
by the health minister Enoch Powell
in 1961, exclusively for married
women with enough children and
those for whom pregnancy was a
serious health risk. In 1967, though,
spurred by poverty in big deprived
families, it was made widely available
at family planning clinics.
Gradually its prescription to
unmarried girls and women over 16
became the norm, though the
culture (I well remember!) still
permitted some rather intrusive
questions. By 1974 doctors could
prescribe it to under-16s, though in a
famous 1980s case Victoria Gillick
vainly challenged their ability to do
this without parental knowledge.
It has sometimes, over those
decades, been hard not to observe
that young women’s health and
freedom from exploitation rated
lower than a political determination
to prevent feckless breeding. I
remember being insulted — already
at work and earning — by being
handed a startlingly large pack of
free condoms to “tide me over till the
chemicals kicked in”. Muttering thatI could afford my own (we were all
more embarrassed in those days), the
clinician’s insistence held the
implication that left to myself I
would recklessly scatter babies
around as a charge on the taxpayer.
The pill changed society and
western women’s lives. Only now
comes a slight decline in its
popularity. UK daily-dose
prescriptions have fallen by aboutI felt insulted when
given a startlingly large
pack of free condoms
There has been an
increase in the
pornification of women
Libby
Purves@lib_thinks