ABSTRACT
As the Pill enabled women to better control reproduction, physicians, pharmaceutical manufacturers and marketers scrutinised women’s thoughts, behaviours, and mentalities concerning reproduction. Since taking the Pill entailed remembering to do something almost every single day, the very act of taking the Pill became a subject of interest, research and innovation. The Pill has long been considered unique in that it was intended to be taken by healthy women, not under the direct supervision of a physician, and for extended periods of time (Watkins 1998; Marks 2001). Thus, women and physicians were quite concerned with several main questions about the Pill: whether it was safe, what its side effects were, and what impact it would have on sexual behaviour and on society at large. The Pill challenged people to consider how much risk was acceptable for a drug that was not meant to cure anything, but to prevent pregnancy. Historians, too, have been drawn to these same weighty issues (see in this volume the chapters by Thoms, and Ignaciuk, Ortiz-Gómez, Rodríguez-Ocaña).
