In partnership with
The IT strategy every team needs for 2026
2026 will redefine IT as a strategic driver of global growth. Automation, AI-driven support, unified platforms, and zero-trust security are becoming standard, especially for distributed teams. This toolkit helps IT and HR leaders assess readiness, define goals, and build a scalable, audit-ready IT strategy for the year ahead. Learn what’s changing and how to prepare.
A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR, MASTERS OF TRIVIA
Trivia is more than a game; it’s a global tradition of knowledge and competition. Masters of Trivia’s tournaments have gone live, with 30 fast, multiple-choice questions. Most correct wins. Speed breaks ties. Compete worldwide for a $MOT token prize purse, plus valuable in-kind prizes.
Get the entry link and reminders by email — subscribe free at PlayMOT.
—— ON THIS DAY ——
MAY 9, 1960
Washington, D.C., USA
65 years ago
Gregory Goodwin Pincus, the reproductive biologist who led the development of the first oral contraceptive — one of the most consequential pharmaceutical achievements of the twentieth century.
On May 9, 1960, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid — the first oral contraceptive — for use as a method of birth control. The pill had been tested in clinical trials in Puerto Rico since 1956 under the direction of biologist Gregory Pincus and gynecologist John Rock. Within two years of approval, over a million American women were taking it. Within five years, over five million. By the end of the decade, the number was in the tens of millions across the developed world.
The development of the pill had been funded in part by Katherine McCormick, a biologist and philanthropist, and had been inspired by Margaret Sanger, who had spent forty years fighting to make contraception legal and accessible in the United States. Sanger had approached Pincus in 1950 with a simple request: create a pill that a woman could take reliably and that no one would know about. It took him and Rock ten years. The result transformed the world.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Margaret Sanger, founder of what became Planned Parenthood — the birth control pioneer who in 1950 urged Pincus to develop a simple, reliable oral contraceptive and helped fund the early research.
The scientific mechanism of the pill was the suppression of ovulation through synthetic progesterone. Pincus and his colleague M.C. Chang had established that this was possible in rabbit experiments. The challenge was translating it to human application safely, reliably, and cheaply. The Puerto Rico trials — conducted among low-income women who were not always fully informed of the experimental nature of the drug — were ethically fraught by modern standards. The medical establishment at the time had different standards. The pill was approved.
The social consequences were immediate and profound. Reliable contraception gave women control over reproduction that had never existed before. The combination of the pill and the economic expansion of the 1960s accelerated women's entry into the workforce, changed expectations about family size, restructured the timing of marriage and childbearing, and contributed to the feminist movements of the decade. The pill did not cause all of these changes, but it enabled them in ways that no previous technology had.
The pill also generated intense controversy from the moment of its approval and has never stopped generating it. The Catholic Church formally condemned it in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. Conservative critics argued it undermined family values and enabled promiscuity. Feminist critics later raised concerns about health effects, the lack of a male equivalent, and the question of who bore the burden of contraception. The debates that the approval of Enovid opened in 1960 are still active.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The pill is the most consequential pharmaceutical product of the twentieth century in terms of social impact. No other drug changed the daily lives, reproductive choices, and economic trajectories of as many people — specifically women — as the oral contraceptive. Its approval is a hinge point in modern social history.
The clinical trials that produced the pill raise important questions about medical ethics and informed consent. The women in Puerto Rico who participated in the trials were not always told they were in an experiment. The history of the pill includes a troubling dimension about whose bodies bore the burden of pharmaceutical development — a dimension that has informed medical ethics standards ever since.
The absence of a male equivalent to the pill, despite decades of research, reflects persistent inequities in how reproductive health is approached. Male contraceptive research has faced scientific, commercial, and cultural barriers that female contraceptive research was eventually able to overcome. The asymmetry is noted, studied, and unresolved.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On May 9, 1960, a small pill was approved by the FDA, and the world changed. The debates it opened — about autonomy, religion, gender roles, medical ethics, and who controls reproduction — have never fully resolved. Sixty-five years later, hundreds of millions of women take some form of hormonal contraceptive. The science Pincus and Rock developed still underlies all of them.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother."
— Margaret Sanger, whose advocacy directly inspired the development of the birth control pill
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the development of the birth control pill, the Puerto Rico trials, the FDA approval process, and the social revolution that followed?
