Medicine: Contraceptive Pill?

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Some of the most hush-hush medical research has been pursued in dozens of laboratories in the effort to find a contraceptive pill. Last week, after months of rumors, President John Searle of Chicago drug manufacturers G. D. Searle & Co. guardedly told stockholders that the company "hopes to introduce ... an item this year for a variety of menstrual disorders . . . There has been speculation that the drug may have a use in the field of physiological birth control." But its safety and effectiveness in that field have not been fully tested, are far from certain.

Unnamed and not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the drug is a synthetic hormone related to those that cause both ovulation and menstruation. If a woman is not menstruating at all, she may take a pill a day for ten to 15 days; three days after she stops, she should begin a regular cycle (though repeat-courses may be needed in some cases). For irregular, excessive or painful menstruation or for between-periods bleeding, the drug is taken on different schedules which must be prescribed by a doctor.

The possibility of "fertility control" arises from the fact that the drug, when taken on certain schedules, apparently prevents ovulation. Since no ovum is then released, there is technically no destruction of life. Studies of the hormone's action on this phase of the cycle are far from complete. Even when the drug is released by the FDA, it will be strictly a prescription item; its effects are so tricky and complicated—there may be dangers still unsuspected—that women will be sharply discouraged from trying to doctor themselves with it.