On December 16, 1975, a group of Washington, D.C. area women's health activists held the first-ever protest at the headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The demonstration took the form of a “memorial service” to commemorate the thousands of women who had died from using the contraceptive pill and other estrogen-containing drugs, and to call attention to the “dangerous experiment” being performed on women. Protesters wore black armbands “to symbolize the deaths of sisters caused by unsafe drugs and hormones,” and carried signs reading, “The Pill Kills,” “Feed your pills to the rats at the FDA,” “Women are not chicks – or white mice,” and “Women's Health, Not Drug Company Wealth.”1 The demonstration received nationwide media attention, and was included in the 1976 ABC television special “Women's Health: A Question of Survival”, produced by Marlene Sanders.2
Today, we are more accustomed to seeing feminist protests that demand better access to birth control rather than greater oversight of contraceptive drugs and devices. For example, there is a movement to “free the pill” from the prescription and make it available over the counter in the United States in the same way as some forms of emergency contraception. Conversely, it is usually birth control opponents who hold demonstrations proclaiming that the “pill kills.” 3
