-Let's go back to the 1950s,
before the birth control pill existed.
Margaret Sanger believed the world needed a pill
that could prevent women from getting pregnant.
-This is When Used Correctly.
Who's not on birth control?
What should you ask your doctor?
Does getting an IUD hurt?
Are condoms really 98% effective?
-Probably not.
-Margaret Sanger was part of the controversial eugenics movement,
which promoted population control.
Experts disagree on just how involved she was.
She also was the founder of Planned Parenthood.
-Margaret Sanger didn't wanna call it population control.
She called it birth control,
so that you were in control of your births.
-She persuaded a biologist to team up with her.
They secured a wealthy women's -rights activist as their funder
and brought on an OB/GYN named John Rock,
who also believed in population control.
And Rock was Catholic.
-He used the word fertility
because he wanted to be able to work on it
because you weren't allowed to talk about birth control.
You had to talk about fertility and maintaining your fertility.
-In 1960, the pill became available for contraceptive use.
It was a hit.
Five years later, 6 point 5 million
American women used the pill.
It was the most popular form of birth control
in the United States.
So, the birth control pill has been invented.
That's a huge milestone.
But the pills were still not very user-friendly.
The complexities and design flaws
were anxiety-inducing for many women.
When the birth control pill was first released,
it came in a bottle.
One bottle for a month's supply of pills.
Imagine if you couldn't remember whether you missed a pill.
You'd have to pour them all out and count.
Even worse, what if the bottle spilled?
How do you know you picked up all the pills?
Just thinking about this is making me sweat.
The potential mishaps that could come with using a pill bottle
were a huge concern for Doris and David Wagner.
They were a married couple in Illinois in the 1960s.
Doris was on the pill.
The two knew there had to be a better design.
David Wagner was an engineer and he began drawing up sketches
and that's how the dial design came to be.
During this time, the birth control pill
was one of the first medications to use pushpacks.
-These are numbered by day
and so you would roll out to 28 days
and you'd have to mark your calendar to 28 days.
These were expired in 1979,
so they're not effective, so don't try and take them.
The old little candies that you used to take,
that were on the pieces of paper.
I'm old enough to remember those.
-Package design improved over the years,
but the instructions for the pill were extremely confusing.
-Triphasal was so complicated.
It has three different-color pills.
Each of these pills had a purpose and they went.
You had to follow the days along.
-The pill was this method that had never existed before.
It was new and seemed really complicated.
And it was still taboo.
During this time, it was still illegal, in some states.
In other states, you had to be married.
For example, in Massachusetts, it was a felony
to distribute contraception to an unmarried woman.
You could get up to five years in prison.
It wasn't until 1972 that all women,
married or not, got that right.
It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
The case was Eisenstadt v Baird.
Birth control was increasingly a national conversation.
The pill was becoming part of women's lives.
At the same time, its case design was evolving,
to resemble everyday objects, like makeup compacts.
Pharmaceutical companies hoped they could make
the pill more approachable.
-Some of these pills were in things that
looked like Wedgwood, so that you could stick them
in your purse and carry them around.
-The next time you hear one of these.
Remember: this little pill has a long story.
-I just couldn't decide if he was really sponge-worthy.
-It took a long time to get to the sponge-worthy moment.
Before the late '80s and early '90s, TV writers
really avoided the issue of birth control,
or found bizarre ways around it.