ABSTRACT
In 2010, a very special 50th birthday party was being held at the Hotel Pierre in New York City . A couple of hundred bejeweled women were in attendance . The reception room was painted robin’s egg blue and the bar was festooned with silver stars . In the middle of the hotel’s lavish ballroom, on a tall pedestal, was perched an enormous cake with bold letters: “ONE SMALL PILL, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR WOMANKIND, ONE MONUMENTAL MOMENT IN HISTORY .” The celebrated “birthday girl” was the contraceptive birth control pill that had been approved in May 1960 . The “pill,” the most popular form of birth control in the United States, was due (in part) to the efforts of an academic chemist Carl Djerassi (1924-2015) who produced synthetic progesterone (called progestin) that could be taken orally to suppress ovulation, thus enabling millions of women to chart their own reproductive destiny .
