Dear ExtraOrdinary You,
If you’ve been with us from Episode 1, you heard about The Pill, how it was approved by the FDA in 1960, even though in some states—like Connecticut—it wasn’t legal. Old turn-of-the-century Comstock laws labeled (libeled?) birth control as vice, obscenity.
Even though Griswold v Connecticut created the right to privacy—and thus, contraception—in 1965, emergency contraception, which can prevent ovulation and thus prevent pregnancy post if taken within 72 hours of sex, wouldn’t come on the market until 1999.
Before then, the idea of a “morning after pill” was just that, a concept more than a product. If your doctor was in the know, she could prescribe you the “Yuzpe regimen,” a certain sequence of birth control pills that would prevent conception even after sex.
Reproductive rights groups were eager to educate Americans about this opportunity, even creating a hotline number (not unlike The Janes!) 1-888-Not-2-Late where you could be referred to a physician who would write the scrip. The number was , and they found funding and got powerhouse ad agency DDB, who do McDonald’s ads, to make them a snappy PSA campaign.
Sadly, the brochure is all I have to share of the hotline—the archives containing those PSAs were not digitized nor accessible at the time of my research.
The first commercially available emergency contraception, which I describe in the episode, was the Preven Emergency Contraceptive Kit. It looked like this:
The twists and turns that it took for the safest, easiest, most effective E.C. product—Plan B—to get FDA approval, and then approval as an over-the-counter medication, are the meat of the podcast episode. They include a House of Cards episode’s worth of betrayals, U-Haul trucks, lawsuits, leaking government documents to the press, and chicanery.
One chapter was apparently a fight over the name “Plan B.” The FDA thought it was too flip, and its champions had to fight hard for it. But public health, as I’ve believed since working at Freelancers Union / Freelancers Insurance Company ages ago, is a marketing campaign.
And now a project called Plan C pills is picking up the narrative baton, letting people know that if anyone finds themselves too late for Plan A and Plan B, there’s a Plan C available in every state for ending an early pregnancy.
I’ll leave you with one more, very excellent piece of marketing that Women’s Capital Corporation (listen for their name in the episode!) provided for an old NBC story.
Too small on your tiny screen to read? It reads:
Delta Delta Thi.
27 Upstanding Young Men.
34 Billion Sneaky Little Sperm.
Enjoy the show!
Carolyn
P.S. You can listen to all our episodes right here in Substack, or in your podcast player of choice, like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or iHeart.
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Plan B Again