Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's nineteen sixty four. NBC News Inchorman David Brinkley
Speaker 1: has come to Boston to meet John Rock.
Speaker 2: Doctor Rock, who is seventy three years old, lives and
Speaker 2: works in Brookline, Massachusetts. Mainly he works at his clinic
Speaker 2: or center, devoted to the study of human reproduction and
Speaker 2: the treatment of problems in an area where, when you
Speaker 2: get down to it, remarkably little is known.
Speaker 1: John Rock the most famous physician in the United States,
Speaker 1: co inventor of one of the most important drugs in
Speaker 1: human history, the birth control pill.
Speaker 2: He went to the High School of Commerce in Boston,
Speaker 2: to Harvard, to Harvard Medical School, interned at Massachusetts General Hospital,
Speaker 2: directed for thirty years of fertility clinic at the Free
Speaker 2: Hospital for Women, and now goes to Mass every day
Speaker 2: at brook Plans Saint Mary's Church.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked or Misunderstood. This is the
Speaker 1: second of three episodes on how to Think Like a Jesuit.
Speaker 1: This one is about John Rock's Great Dilemma, a man
Speaker 1: who went to Mass every day at Saint Mary's Catholic
Speaker 1: Church and then helped create the pill, something his church
Speaker 1: could not accept.
Speaker 3: One of the events that would shape my later life
Speaker 3: to a great degree was an experience I had with
Speaker 3: the cynic who was a cured in Marlborough.
Speaker 1: Rock is tall, distinguished, looks like Carry Grant. His interview
Speaker 1: with Brinkley was over how a century ago, so forgive
Speaker 1: the quality of the tape.
Speaker 3: I was just about fourteen and then walking out of
Speaker 3: Mass one Sunday when Father Finnick beckoned me and asked
Speaker 3: me if I would like to drive down with him
Speaker 3: to visit old Folks home old children called the Profile.
Speaker 3: Father Finnick was a quiet and unobtrusive man. When he
Speaker 3: was holding forth at first Communion class or Confirmation class,
Speaker 3: he put across what he intended us to learn with
Speaker 3: clarity and vigor, so that much of it has remained
Speaker 3: with me all my life.
Speaker 1: At this point, NBC shows b roll of a horse
Speaker 1: and carriage, something Rock would have ridden in his youth,
Speaker 1: and if added sound effects, God bless them.
Speaker 3: We had never been more than just friendly, but somehow
Speaker 3: I remember quite distinctly that ride. He was sounding off saying, John,
Speaker 3: always stick to your own conscience. Let no one ever
Speaker 3: keep it for you.
Speaker 1: It's clear as Rock tells that story that it has
Speaker 1: stayed with him his whole life.
Speaker 3: And just as I was beginning to get that, and
Speaker 3: then there was a moment's pause, and then he said,
Speaker 3: and when I say no one, I mean no one.
Speaker 3: I've never forgotten those words.
Speaker 1: So I just want to talk about him because I
Speaker 1: find him, as I'm sure you do, to be such
Speaker 1: a fascinating figure, extraordinary.
Speaker 4: Figure, really complicated. Really, I don't feel like I ever
Speaker 4: really understood him all those years in those papers. I
Speaker 4: feel like I understood him partly, but I don't feel
Speaker 4: like I ever completely understood him.
Speaker 1: I went to Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia to talk to
Speaker 1: the two people who probably know more about John Rock
Speaker 1: than anyone else, Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, who wrote
Speaker 1: a book called The Fertility Doctor. It's the definitive account
Speaker 1: of Rock. You go first.
Speaker 4: I'm Margaret Marsh and I'm a university professor. That's a title,
Speaker 4: university professor at Records University.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I'm Wanda Runner and I'm a gynecologist. I work for
Speaker 5: penn Medicine. I'm a professor of Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology,
Speaker 5: and I work at Pennsylvania Hospital and your sisters.
Speaker 1: Where did you guys grow up around here? Is that
Speaker 1: why you're in this We grew up.
Speaker 4: In Vineland, New Jersey. We grew up with our father's family,
Speaker 4: Italian Americans. We're the granddaughters of immigrants, and a lot
Speaker 4: of our family is still there in Vineland.
Speaker 1: Oh so, so, I'm assuming your Catholic or were many
Speaker 1: years ago, many years ago, I see, But this is
Speaker 1: not foreign territory for you, not at all to be
Speaker 1: talking about Catholics. Everyone in this episode is Catholic except
Speaker 1: for me. I'm a wannabe.
Speaker 6: Well. We always have this joke when people ask guess
Speaker 6: how we work so well together, and we always say
Speaker 6: I always say I'm the oldest sister, so I get
Speaker 6: to be the boss, and she says, I'm the younger sister,
Speaker 6: so I always get my way, Which it's true.
Speaker 5: It's true.
Speaker 1: The two of them spent years on John Rock, tracking
Speaker 1: down relatives and colleagues, slowly working their way through his papers.
Speaker 1: Rock's daughter told them that he had been undecided about
Speaker 1: what kind of medicine to practice, but then in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds he had a rotation as a medical
Speaker 1: student delivering babies in the Irish tenements of Boston. He
Speaker 1: saw a wretched poverty, young women overwhelmed with five or
Speaker 1: six or seven children families. They could barely feed her clothes.
Speaker 4: The overwhelming sorrow he felt for the women and their
Speaker 4: difficult situations was what decided him to go into obstetrics
Speaker 4: and gynecology.
Speaker 1: Rock founded the Fertility and Endocrine Clinic at the Free
Speaker 1: Hospital for Women in Brookline, where he served the Irish
Speaker 1: poor of Boston through the difficult years of the Depression
Speaker 1: and the Second World War. He was never terribly interested
Speaker 1: in charging for his services.
Speaker 5: I think, and you know, okay, I love the man. Now,
Speaker 5: what can I say?
Speaker 7: I think of him as an unusual figure in medicine,
Speaker 7: But you know, he had that gift of being able to.
Speaker 5: Communicate with women from all different classes.
Speaker 1: One of Rock's friends was a researcher pen named Luigi Mastroianni,
Speaker 1: who was still alive when the sisters were doing their work.
Speaker 4: It was Luigi who said he would come out. This
Speaker 4: was whether it was a clinic patient or a private patient.
Speaker 4: He'd come out. He'd greet the patient, he'd walk her
Speaker 4: back in, sit her down, talk to her.
Speaker 5: And always direct, you know, not he would always have
Speaker 5: a direct conversation with the patient, you know, like directly
Speaker 5: look at them.
Speaker 1: Not to push the Catholic thing too far, but it's
Speaker 1: very He has a touch of the parish priest in him, a.
Speaker 5: Touch, a touch that's really good. That did you grow
Speaker 5: up Catholic too?
Speaker 1: Like I said, I want to be Catholic, not the
Speaker 1: real thing.
Speaker 5: I think that's very I think that is.
Speaker 1: Good.
Speaker 5: Doctors always have a touch of the parish priest, or
Speaker 5: the minister, or the rabbi or because if you don't,
Speaker 5: you're less effective.
Speaker 4: And not to brag about my sister, but she does
Speaker 4: have the second highest patient satisfactory.
Speaker 5: That's all I all have. It's mandatory.
Speaker 8: She's very she's very good.
Speaker 9: Love.
Speaker 4: She's one of the most beloved parish.
Speaker 3: She's one of the most love.
Speaker 1: Your sister is allowed to boast about you. I don't
Speaker 1: know why you're why you're trying to stop her?
Speaker 3: Wait?
Speaker 1: Where were we got involved with birth control? Almost by accident.
Speaker 1: He was more interested in treating infertility, and in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties he started working with two hormones that had
Speaker 1: only just been isolated, estrogen and progesterone. What's his theory
Speaker 1: that progesterone and estrin might be useful in combating infertility?
Speaker 5: Okay, okay, I'll tell you.
Speaker 7: My conjecture was that, I think it came out of
Speaker 7: looking at the endometrium, you know, to seeing that some
Speaker 7: women did not have the secretory changes that would have
Speaker 7: been anticipated after ovulation.
Speaker 10: I think that makes sense because the way he would
Speaker 10: explain it, yes, was he said some women seemed to
Speaker 10: have underdeveloped.
Speaker 4: Systems.
Speaker 5: He said systems he used.
Speaker 10: Underdeveloped oh yes, reproductive systems. And he thought that this
Speaker 10: underdevelopment was due to a problem with the hormones. And
Speaker 10: this was all observation. Remember, they didn't know anything. I mean,
Speaker 10: they didn't you know, they didn't know the kinds of
Speaker 10: things we know now, So it's all observationalized. And he
Speaker 10: would say, some of them get pregnant on their own,
Speaker 10: and then after they get pregnant, once on their own,
Speaker 10: their systems quote seemed to be developed.
Speaker 1: In the analogy of a car with a dead battery, Yeah,
Speaker 1: jumpstart the battery, and then after that the battery works.
Speaker 4: Yes, sort of what he's thinking, sort of, yes, yes.
Speaker 1: So that's how Rock got interested in the role of
Speaker 1: hormones in reproduction. Meanwhile, fifty miles away in Worcester, a
Speaker 1: scientist named Gregory Pinkus was working on the same idea,
Speaker 1: only he thought that estrogen and progesterone might actually work
Speaker 1: to prevent pregnancy. Pincus and Rock started doing research together,
Speaker 1: which is how the birth control pill came about. Pincus
Speaker 1: was the hard scientist. Rock ran the clinical trials. They
Speaker 1: took their data to the Food and Drug Administration in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, asking it to approve the pill as
Speaker 1: a prescription drug. The FDA dragged its feet, so Rock
Speaker 1: paid a personal visit. As he told David Brinkley in
Speaker 1: the NBC profile.
Speaker 11: When we went down, we hadn't a point where with
Speaker 11: the director of FDA or something like that, because all
Speaker 11: the material had been sent to Washington and no response.
Speaker 1: Tall distinguished John Rock, the Catholic Kerry Grant, the most
Speaker 1: famous doctor in America, knocked on the man's door.
Speaker 11: Yeah, all material, the right stack of stuff was just
Speaker 11: and he hadn't even looked at it. So we talked
Speaker 11: about it, and he said, well he would go sow
Speaker 11: it as soon as he could. And I went over
Speaker 11: and then you have no time.
Speaker 3: You'll do it now, and they said all right, and
Speaker 3: so he signed to watch the call it.
Speaker 4: That was it.
Speaker 1: One of the two or three most important drugs of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century was approved because as one of the
Speaker 1: drugs inventors took the train to Washington, marched into the
Speaker 1: FDA and said, you'll do it now.
Speaker 11: That I probably the government in taking the final step,
Speaker 11: but we knew it was all right. I mean, I
Speaker 11: was convinced, but my conscience was clear about that.
Speaker 1: How much do you love John Rock? But now John
Speaker 1: Rock has a problem. He's helped create the world's greatest contraceptive,
Speaker 1: and yet he's a devout Roman Catholic and his church
Speaker 1: doesn't believe in contraception. Consider The Costy canoeby People Encyclical
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty. In it, Pope Pious the eleventh declared
Speaker 1: that and a quote, any use whatsoever of matrimony exercise
Speaker 1: in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated
Speaker 1: in its natural power to generate life is an offense
Speaker 1: against the law of God and of nature, and those
Speaker 1: who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of
Speaker 1: a grave sin. The act is deliberately frustrated in its
Speaker 1: natural power to generate life. That's what a contraceptive does.
Speaker 1: And what is John Rock's birth control pill. It is
Speaker 1: a pill that deliberately frustrates the natural power to generate life.
Speaker 1: Let's run through John Rock's options. He could renounce his
Speaker 1: work on the pill and accept the teaching of the church.
Speaker 1: Only he's not going to do that, is he He
Speaker 1: remembers what his priest told him when he was a boy,
Speaker 1: John always stick to your own conscience. Let no one
Speaker 1: ever keep it for you. Margaret Marsha and Wander ron
Speaker 1: Or tell the story in their book of when Rock
Speaker 1: was nineteen and he got a job with the United
Speaker 1: Fruit Company in Guatemala. He was responsible for a group
Speaker 1: of Jamaican migrant workers and United Fruit decided to cut
Speaker 1: everyone's wages. And who did Rock support his workers?
Speaker 4: He just defied all the bosses that United Fruit and
Speaker 4: he said, they don't need a wage cut. There's no
Speaker 4: reason for a wagecot. I'm not cutting the wages on
Speaker 4: my farm. Kind of thinny. Of course, they cut the
Speaker 4: wages on his farm. Then there's this huge strike and
Speaker 4: he says, well, he rights to the president of the company,
Speaker 4: say this is ridiculous. If you were here, you would
Speaker 4: know that this is wrong. They don't need a wage cut.
Speaker 4: And then there's the strike and one of the Jamaican
Speaker 4: workers is very gravely injured and two of the others aren't.
Speaker 4: He's like nineteen years old. He wades into this wildcat strike,
Speaker 4: gets the injured men, brings them to the hospital. And
Speaker 4: you wonder, where does a nineteen year old who's probably
Speaker 4: never had a deep thought about racial injustice in his life,
Speaker 4: where does he get that reservoir?
Speaker 1: John Rock always kept his own conscience. Many years later,
Speaker 1: in his dilemma over the church and the birth control pill,
Speaker 1: he had another option. Of course, he could leave the church.
Speaker 1: Lots of people have left the Catholic Church over disagreements
Speaker 1: with its teachings. But Rock can't leave the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 4: Leaving Catholicism would have I don't think he would have
Speaker 4: ever thought of it.
Speaker 1: Well, I noticed there was a little line that you
Speaker 1: quoted from my I think one of his diaries about
Speaker 1: a day where he said he attended Mass in three
Speaker 1: different churches in one day. Yeah, yeah, so that gives
Speaker 1: you a flavor of I suppose.
Speaker 4: The culture his mother was to vow. His mother was
Speaker 4: very different about Yeah. One of my colleagues, who's a
Speaker 4: James Joyce scholar, told me about a line in one
Speaker 4: of James Joyce's book where the hero and his friend
Speaker 4: are walking around. Then one of them is saying to
Speaker 4: the other one, I've lost my faith. Man, I've lost
Speaker 4: my faith. And so the other one says, are you
Speaker 4: going to become a Protestant? And he says, I lost
Speaker 4: my faith? Man, I didn't tell you I lost my mind.
Speaker 1: And that's very John Rock. So he's not going to
Speaker 1: put his head down and go along. And he's not
Speaker 1: going to abandon the church. That leaves only one option.
Speaker 1: He's going to stay and try to convince the church
Speaker 1: to change its mind. Now, how do you do that
Speaker 1: if you're a devout Catholic in the nineteen sixties. The
Speaker 1: answer is you think like a Jesuit. Let's leave John
Speaker 1: Rock for a moment and let me run a thought
Speaker 1: experiment by you. It comes out of a conversation I
Speaker 1: had with a scientist named Kurt Barnhardt. He's a professor
Speaker 1: at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia, an
Speaker 1: obgyn who does research in reproductive biology. Barnhardt's kind of
Speaker 1: a modern day version of John Rock, only now we
Speaker 1: know a lot more about female reproduction than we did
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 12: I mean to insult you with a student level lecture,
Speaker 12: but you know progesterone is pulling the plug out from
Speaker 12: the street to turn the lights off in your house.
Speaker 12: It's not turning the lamp off on your bedstands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're still dropped, in other words, in a relatively
Speaker 1: crude conceptual model about how to prevent.
Speaker 12: Yeah, right, right, And it would be better if you
Speaker 12: could prevent ovulation. I mean the home run I'll share
Speaker 12: the Nobel Prize with you would be there's an attrisia
Speaker 12: of eggs with women's aging. If I could stop women's
Speaker 12: eggs from growing and not losing them, not only would
Speaker 12: I prevent I would allow you to get pregnant when
Speaker 12: you want. I would remove the biological clock and you
Speaker 12: could get pregnant at sixty right.
Speaker 1: So you mean you could decouple the aging of a
Speaker 1: woman's eggs from the regular aging process.
Speaker 9: Is that?
Speaker 11: What is that?
Speaker 12: Theoretically? I mean, lucularly, if woman is born with all
Speaker 12: the eggs that she ever makes and they're all sitting
Speaker 12: in the ovary, and what's really neat is and we
Speaker 12: don't understand this. But in one month, a group of
Speaker 12: eggs starts growing and competing. That's the one that ovulates,
Speaker 12: and all the other ones die off. When you run
Speaker 12: out of groups, you run out of menopause. But we
Speaker 12: don't understand what tells the group to grow. So if
Speaker 12: we could say, don't grow your follicle this month, throw
Speaker 12: it next.
Speaker 1: Month, putting it on pause. Right, a woman is born
Speaker 1: with a fixed number of eggs, you don't make any
Speaker 1: new ones. By puberty, you might have three hundred to
Speaker 1: four hundred thousand eggs, and every month, like clockwork, you
Speaker 1: lose about a thousand of them. That's the iron logic
Speaker 1: of female fertility. But Barnhardt says, we might have found
Speaker 1: a drug that would allow a woman to stop the clock,
Speaker 1: to hit pause. It's being developed by several of his colleagues,
Speaker 1: Kara Goldman at Northwestern among them. It's called m tour.
Speaker 1: Now understand that this approach, under the best of circumstances,
Speaker 1: is years and years away from ever becoming available. That's
Speaker 1: why this is a thought experiment. So here's the question.
Speaker 1: Is mTOR a contraceptive.
Speaker 12: I wouldn't pitch it as contraception. I wouldn't I would.
Speaker 12: I would pitch it as delay, you know words. It's
Speaker 12: not like I'm trying to not get pregnant today by
Speaker 12: need a contraceptive, right, I mean no, let's gout. Wow,
Speaker 12: this is interesting, right.
Speaker 1: Because I'm thinking you're, you know, up against the exact
Speaker 1: same dilemma John Rock was up against, which is you know,
Speaker 1: could you, for example, could you with the How would
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church view such a measure? They're they're opposed
Speaker 1: to artificial contraception, but what if this is not? Is
Speaker 1: this plausibly not contraception?
Speaker 12: Yeah? I'm Catholic, and I struggle with us all the time.
Speaker 1: Like I said, everyone in this story is Catholic. On
Speaker 1: the one hand, Barnhardt says, m tour is obviously something
Speaker 1: that allows a woman to have sex without the possibility
Speaker 1: of getting pregnant. You take a pill and you know,
Speaker 1: longer ovulate. As the Pope wrote in nineteen thirty, those
Speaker 1: who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of
Speaker 1: a grave sin. How is the Pope going to agree
Speaker 1: with mTOR?
Speaker 12: But on the other hand, well, you could say that
Speaker 12: this is a way of controlling your aging or postponing
Speaker 12: or prophylaxing or being sure. But I'm open to having
Speaker 12: a family, and I'm open to life, and I'm open later,
Speaker 12: just not right now. So that may be a plausible.
Speaker 1: Argument if you look at it that way. M tour
Speaker 1: is actually not a means to suppress your fertility, but
Speaker 1: a means to extend your fertility. How is the pope
Speaker 1: going to have a problem with a mechanism that allows
Speaker 1: women to have more children later in life. If this
Speaker 1: way of thinking sounds familiar, it should. Barnhard is doing
Speaker 1: a nice little bit of casuistry here, the kind of
Speaker 1: thinking we described in the previous episode. Casuistry, remember, begins
Speaker 1: with the descent into the particular. What exactly am I
Speaker 1: dealing with? Well, a drug that effectively freezes your eggs
Speaker 1: inside your own body. Then casuistry involves an exercise in taxonomy.
Speaker 1: Where does this new case fit in relation to existing cases?
Speaker 1: And Barnhart's point is that emptor is often the corner
Speaker 1: with fertility drugs, not over here with the traditional contraceptives.
Speaker 1: Barnhart said that the first thing his group is going
Speaker 1: to try and do is a study with women who
Speaker 1: are undergoing chemotherapy, because chemotherapy in many cases destroys a
Speaker 1: woman's eggs, not all of them.
Speaker 12: In some cases.
Speaker 1: Yeah, are you serious?
Speaker 12: Chemotherapy is designed to kill dividing cells, and by definition, right,
Speaker 12: that's what it's killing. And it also kills many other
Speaker 12: slowly dividing cells. That's why you get gie upset and
Speaker 12: you lose your hair. But it also kills women's eggs.
Speaker 12: So one of the consequences cur could stop, could stop
Speaker 12: the development of the eggs such that they're no longer
Speaker 12: receptive to the chemotherapy.
Speaker 1: By hitting pause on the whole thing. Right, Oh see,
Speaker 1: that's what a clever Oh, so pitch that way. You're
Speaker 1: not even talking. You're talking about this is an agent
Speaker 1: of the preservation of fertility right now. Notice what Barnard
Speaker 1: is doing here. He's not saying the church's position on
Speaker 1: contraception is crazy and needs to be changed. He's saying,
Speaker 1: this new thing that we've come up with may actually
Speaker 1: be consistent with the church's teaching. Isn't the church interested
Speaker 1: in creating life? Well, mTOR is very much in that spirit.
Speaker 1: Look at its potential for creating life. Is this hair splitting.
Speaker 1: Casuistry is sometimes criticized on just those grounds that it's
Speaker 1: a way for smart people to rationalize doing whatever they want.
Speaker 1: That's why the term jesuitical has a slightly derogatory connotation.
Speaker 1: But that's not what's happening here. This isn't cynical rationalization.
Speaker 1: Right now, the Catholic teaching on contraception makes it harder
Speaker 1: from millions of women in developing countries to get access
Speaker 1: to birth control, despite the fact that controlling fertility is
Speaker 1: one of the easiest ways to lift families out of poverty.
Speaker 1: We can wait for the pope one day to change
Speaker 1: his mind, or we can come up with a contraceptive
Speaker 1: that is different enough from traditional contraceptives that it no
Speaker 1: longer has to be called a contraceptive. The rules of
Speaker 1: how to behave ethically in the modern world do not
Speaker 1: come down from the heavens on stone tablets. They are
Speaker 1: things that have to be negotiated. Casuistry is a method
Speaker 1: of doing that negotiation. You see, you're a Catholic.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, And I struggle with that. Do I know
Speaker 12: more scientifically in the popes too? Sure? Does that allow
Speaker 12: me to allow get different interpretations? I don't know.
Speaker 1: You are in a line of research that if the
Speaker 1: Pope were here, sitting in his chair, he would disagree
Speaker 1: with what you do for a living.
Speaker 12: I would hope not, but he probably would.
Speaker 1: I guess just that idea that the Pope would disapprove
Speaker 1: seemed to pain him. And that's exactly how John Rock
Speaker 1: must have felt half a century ago. He helped to
Speaker 1: invent a method of birth control, and he worried that
Speaker 1: the Pope might sit down next to him one day
Speaker 1: and disapprove of his life's work. So he decided to
Speaker 1: put on his casuists cloak and try to change the
Speaker 1: Pope's mind. John Rock's argument in favor of the pill
Speaker 1: begins with a nice little bit of casuitical taxonomy. On
Speaker 1: the one hand, he said, there are the barrier contraceptives
Speaker 1: that the Church has explicitly called sinful condoms, the diaphragm.
Speaker 1: That is what the Pope was talking about in nineteen
Speaker 1: when he referred to methods that frustrate the natural power
Speaker 1: to generate life. On the other hand, though, there was
Speaker 1: the rhythm method. Rhythm is the idea that a couple
Speaker 1: might prevent pregnancy by not having sex during a woman's
Speaker 1: fertile days when she's ovulating. In nineteen fifty one, Pope
Speaker 1: Pius the twelfth addressed a group of midwives in Italy,
Speaker 1: and in his speech he explicitly gave his blessing to
Speaker 1: the rhythm method of birth control. In his statement on
Speaker 1: the rhythm method, how does he resolve the issue of
Speaker 1: whether the whether the rhythm method is contraception or not?
Speaker 8: Oh, just by ignoring it. That's a time honored way
Speaker 8: of solving problems.
Speaker 1: That's the historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler, who wrote a brilliant
Speaker 1: book on the Church's history with contraception.
Speaker 8: He's speaking to Italian midwives, the Congress of Italian Midwives,
Speaker 8: and I presume what it reflects is the reality of
Speaker 8: war torn Italy. You know, of a country that's really
Speaker 8: been decimated, where people aren't desperately poor. So in fact,
Speaker 8: he's saying, I know you're facing problems out there. And
Speaker 8: here is mother Church's pastoral response.
Speaker 1: So there are some kinds of birth control the Catholic churches, okay,
Speaker 1: with natural kinds, and there are some kinds. It opposes
Speaker 1: artificial kinds. But let's descend into the particulars here for
Speaker 1: a moment. It's not quite true that the rhythm method
Speaker 1: is perfectly natural, at least not as it was being
Speaker 1: practiced in the nineteen fifties. Walk the naive listener through
Speaker 1: what practicing the rhythm method in the fifties met.
Speaker 8: Right, Well, it was new and improved rhythm in the fifties,
Speaker 8: and in the beginning, you just you sort of looked
Speaker 8: at the calendar. You assume that your menstrual period would
Speaker 8: occur at such and such a point in the cycle,
Speaker 8: and there'd be no variations, so you just count.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: This doesn't work very well at preventing pregnancy.
Speaker 8: The one that dominates in the f these is the
Speaker 8: so called basal temperature method, whereby apparently when a woman ovulates,
Speaker 8: they'll be a very slight increase in her body temperature.
Speaker 8: But that means that every morning you have to take
Speaker 8: your temperature rectally because that's the most sensitive way, and
Speaker 8: recorded before you get out of bed, before you do anything,
Speaker 8: which is not always easy if you already have a
Speaker 8: house full of young children.
Speaker 1: Yes, you got seven kids screaming, that's right, and you're
Speaker 1: taking your temperature rectally.
Speaker 8: That's right, which in the screaming light, I should think
Speaker 8: cause your temperature to rise for wholly independent reasons.
Speaker 1: Templar is Catholic, of course, and as someone who grew
Speaker 1: up in the nineteen sixties, this is a world she
Speaker 1: knew intimately.
Speaker 8: I married into a family where my husband's considerably older brothers,
Speaker 8: who'd had their kids in the forties and fifties, had
Speaker 8: ten and twelve each. His only sister, very sensibly joined
Speaker 8: a religious order and only left after her reproductive years
Speaker 8: were over, although I don't really think that was her motivation,
Speaker 8: but who can tell.
Speaker 1: Birth control was a big part of what Catholics talked
Speaker 1: and thought about in those years, and Rock is right
Speaker 1: in the middle of that obsession. He actually runs a
Speaker 1: rhythm methic clinic in Boston. He's one of the researchers
Speaker 1: who helps establish when in a woman's cycle ovulation occurs.
Speaker 1: That's how he makes his reputation. So after John Rock
Speaker 1: gets FDA approval for his birth control pill, he writes
Speaker 1: a best selling book called The Time Has Come, where
Speaker 1: he does a brilliant bit of casuistry. Is the pill
Speaker 1: more like a classic artificial method like the condom? Or
Speaker 1: is it more of a semi natural method like rhythm?
Speaker 1: And ROC's answer in his book is the pill is
Speaker 1: like rhythm. It uses the very same hormones found in
Speaker 1: a woman's body, estrogen and progesterone. And what does it do.
Speaker 1: It mimics pregnancy, which is the most natural of states.
Speaker 3: The chemical subjects in these pills acts in the body
Speaker 3: exactly like progesterone to the mother's over reproduces.
Speaker 1: It's Rock again explaining the science to David Brinkley.
Speaker 3: And it has the same effect on the regulating mechanism
Speaker 3: for ripening eggs and for the releasing eggs. If a
Speaker 3: woman takes the pill month after month after month and
Speaker 3: continuously not missing any day at all, she is in
Speaker 3: effect establishing just a pseudo pregnancy and make believe pregnancy
Speaker 3: early on.
Speaker 1: Leslie Tetler says, many people in the Catholic Church, important people, theologians,
Speaker 1: church leaders, sided with Rock's argument.
Speaker 8: All the language, all the logic of Catholic teaching on
Speaker 8: contraception presumes barrier method, you know, kind of intervening in
Speaker 8: the midst of this act. I think many of them
Speaker 8: see the pill as something completely different. You take the
Speaker 8: pill in the morning and has nothing to do with
Speaker 8: the sexual act unless you're in a very unusual relationship,
Speaker 8: and you don't have to mess about in the genital area,
Speaker 8: you don't have to think about interrupting the sex act.
Speaker 8: It's great stuff. You know, it's psychologically unhooked from all
Speaker 8: the messiness of traditional contraception, and I think theologians into
Speaker 8: it that this might be a way to pry the
Speaker 8: whole thing open, to at least create a debate where
Speaker 8: at least officially none can exist.
Speaker 1: It helps that Rock is who he is, a doctor
Speaker 1: on the front lines, who's been serving the Catholic poor
Speaker 1: of Boston his whole career, listening to the troubles of
Speaker 1: women who had eight children and too many miscarriages to
Speaker 1: count all by the time they were thirty. The cardinals
Speaker 1: and the Pope were on the front lines like he was.
Speaker 1: They were sitting celibate behind the walls of the Vatican.
Speaker 8: You take John Paul a second for example. We're leaping
Speaker 8: ahead a bit from the sixties here, but you know
Speaker 8: it's still the sixties issues. Yeah, all his talks on
Speaker 8: theology of the body, which are lovely and lyrical and
Speaker 8: also make the case for not using contraception, But when
Speaker 8: you finish reading them, which is hard, you come away
Speaker 8: with a sense that he's not talking about real bodies,
Speaker 8: you know, not bodies that get tired, that get hungry,
Speaker 8: that ache to love someone, that can have too many children,
Speaker 8: that can get pregnant right now.
Speaker 1: But that's the weird thing that you have. It's incredibly
Speaker 1: intimate discussion of female reproduction done by essentially middle aged
Speaker 1: seven men.
Speaker 8: Yeah, exactly. And you know, a lot of the men
Speaker 8: I interviewed because they were ordained in the forties and
Speaker 8: the fifties, some even in the late thirties, they had
Speaker 8: gone to seminary at the age of fourteen. And I
Speaker 8: really think that many of them, certainly during the period
Speaker 8: of upheople around birth control, had themselves not had sexual experience.
Speaker 8: All of them said to me, he said, you know,
Speaker 8: when I was a young priest, I really hated for
Speaker 8: anyone to confess to sexual sin because I didn't know
Speaker 8: what I was talking about.
Speaker 1: In response to Rock's challenge, the Vaticans set up an
Speaker 1: international commission in the early nineteen sixties seventy two people, theologians,
Speaker 1: medical experts. They deliberated for three years and they end
Speaker 1: up voting sixty eight to four in favor of the pill.
Speaker 1: And what is the Commission's argument for voting in favor
Speaker 1: a Jesuits argument. They say that you can't make a
Speaker 1: general rule about contraception, that each case is different, every family,
Speaker 1: every woman faces her own unique set of issues. When
Speaker 1: the Pope gave his blessing to the rhythm method, it
Speaker 1: was because he saw that the women of Italy were
Speaker 1: suffering in the years after the war, poor overwhelmed that
Speaker 1: Pope that consideration of the particulars of their situation softened
Speaker 1: his commitment to principle. In the early nineteen sixties, the
Speaker 1: Papal Commission took the same position with the pill. The
Speaker 1: chairman of the majority report was a priest named Joseph Fuchs,
Speaker 1: and everyone thought he was going to rule against Rock
Speaker 1: because he was a conservative, but he was also a Jesuit.
Speaker 13: Funny thing happens is that Fuchs, while he's on the committee,
Speaker 13: starts listening to the late people on the Commission, and
Speaker 13: the lay people start talking in a way that they
Speaker 13: are entertaining particularities that he never entertained.
Speaker 1: That's father Keenan, who he met in the previous episode
Speaker 1: The Jesuit Scholar in Rome.
Speaker 13: Only the married couple fully understands that as a matter
Speaker 13: of fact, this husband or this mother is going to
Speaker 13: lose their job. They have to take care of this.
Speaker 13: They can't stay at home. All of a sudden, all
Speaker 13: these different issues are not being entertained, and he realizes,
Speaker 13: we have to be teaching people how to make judgments
Speaker 13: and conscience because they're going to have circumstances that we
Speaker 13: can never anticipate, and they're going to have the better
Speaker 13: ability than we who don't have that information.
Speaker 1: There are too many cases and too many particulars. So
Speaker 1: in the end, Fuchs says that the decision ought to
Speaker 1: lie with the wife and the husband. The birth control
Speaker 1: is a case that each Catholic must decide for herself.
Speaker 13: He's teaching that you don't need to go to a
Speaker 13: priest for a casuist. You have to become a casuist.
Speaker 13: That's what he's doing.
Speaker 1: For two years. Pope Paul six pondered the commission's findings. Finally,
Speaker 1: in the Humani Vitae Encyclical of July twenty eighth, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, he made up his mind. He looked back
Speaker 1: at the nineteen thirty ruling of his predecessor, and he said,
Speaker 1: all of this elegant casuistry around the pill is irrelevant.
Speaker 1: I cannot overturn received papal teaching. At the church's crucial moment,
Speaker 1: when Pope Paul the sixth had the chance to offer
Speaker 1: consolation to millions of Catholics around the world, he flinched.
Speaker 1: He put a principle ahead of the particulars. Don't let
Speaker 1: anyone tell you that the courageous man is the man
Speaker 1: of principle. The courageous person is actually the one who
Speaker 1: knows when to put principle aside. John Rock retired to
Speaker 1: a small town in New Hampshire because he was never
Speaker 1: interested in charging for his services. He ran out of
Speaker 1: money in his later years. He had to live simply.
Speaker 2: He starts as day reading and answering mail critical and
Speaker 2: otherwise from readers of his book advocating the burst control pill.
Speaker 1: David Brinkley sat with him in his office and they
Speaker 1: re enacted his daily ritual. John Rock holds a letter
Speaker 1: in his hands.
Speaker 9: Your article in the magazines in regard to birth control
Speaker 9: as rather nauseating. Did you ever think of the day
Speaker 9: you would meet your God an account for your work
Speaker 9: while on earth? I can hardly believe that you or
Speaker 9: anyone else can interfere with the divine natural law.
Speaker 3: God will provide. I am I'm sorry I upset your stomach.
Speaker 3: You may be very sure that I've gone through some
Speaker 3: entertains myself.
Speaker 9: Oh this.
Speaker 3: Problem that I am so concerned.
Speaker 1: Is for John Rock. His obligation as a Catholic was
Speaker 1: never to the mute enforcement of natural law. He went
Speaker 1: into the tenements of Boston remember and felt overwhelming sorrow.
Speaker 3: As far as meeting my God, I I've been taught
Speaker 3: and I believe that he's here with me all the time.
Speaker 3: As I have to meet him every day. I really
Speaker 3: try to conformed what he tells me. Here's the thing
Speaker 3: to do.
Speaker 1: He shared the obligation of the Jesuits to console those
Speaker 1: in need of consolation.
Speaker 3: Perhaps I'm a little hard of hearing at times, but
Speaker 3: I do my best.
Speaker 1: As Wanda Runners said, I think I love the man.
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is produced by Mee Label and Jacob Smith
Speaker 1: with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. FLAONN Williams
Speaker 1: is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music
Speaker 1: by Luis Skira. Special thanks to Carle Migliori, Heather Feine,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Maya Kaney, and Jacob Iceberg. Revisionist history is
Speaker 1: brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Badwell.