
Publish Date: April 7, 1967
Cover Story: Freedom From Fear
How TIME Covered the News:
“Now there are twelve varieties, divided into two main classes, but all have two principal effects. First, they regularize a woman’s monthly cycle so that she has her “period” every 26 to 28 days, as nature presumably intended. To this extent, the pills are biologically normalizing. Their second major effect is to do something that nature neither intended nor foresaw, and that is to prevent the release of a fertilizable egg from the woman’s ovaries during the cycle in which the pills are taken, and thus make it impossible for her to conceive….
The pill poses two grave moral problems. The first affects Roman Catholics and, for different theological reasons, the smaller number of Orthodox Jews. Not until 1930 did the Vatican modify the Augustinian rule that sex must be for procreation, when Pope Pius XI approved the rhythm method. The Vatican has banned all mechanical and chemical contraception. But Dr. Rock, an unswerving Catholic, has been arguing ever since he sired the pill that its use imitates nature—which occasionally, but only occasionally, makes a woman skip ovulation—and that it should therefore be approved by the Vatican. Pope Paul said last October that the question of birth control was not open to doubt.”