An Indiana teacher, 23, told TIME in 1967 “When I got married, I was still in college and wanted to be certain that I finished. Now we want to buy a home and it’s going to be possible a lot sooner if I teach. With the Pill I know I can keep earning money and not worry about an accident that would ruin everything,” Writes Time Magazine reporter Nancy Gibbs in an article called The Pill at 50: Sex, Freedom & Paradox.

Fifty years later this story is still relevant to young people seeking financial stability during these economic hard times.  As the Pill turns 50, what better time to talk about the impact it has made on our society?

The Food and Drug Administration announced that it would approve the oral contraceptive in 1960. At the time, promoters of the pill hoped that it would be an end to poverty, a cure for divorce, and the elimination of unwed pregnancy.  Few of it’s promoters imagined how it would become a tool for transforming women’s lives writes New York Times Op-Ed contributor Elaine Tyler May.

The pill is one of the most transformative medical breakthroughs of the past 100 years.  In 1999 the Economist named it one of the most important scientific advances of the 20th century. The pill enables women to plan their own futures by giving them the ability to make decisions about the type of education, employment, economics and lifestyles they envision for themselves and their children.

Advocates of the pill have long fought for all women to have access to the pill.  When it first debuted in 1960 it was only available to married women in a few states until a court decision in 1965 made it available to married women in all states. It wasn’t even available to single women in all states until another court decision in 1972.

“By the 1970s the true impact of the Pill could begin to be measured, and it was not on the sexual behavior of American women; it was on how they envisioned their lives, their choices and their obligations. In 1970 the median age at which college graduates married was about 23; by 1975, as use of the Pill among single women became more common, that age had jumped 2.5 years. The fashion for large families went the way of the girdle. In 1963, 80 percent of non-Catholic college women said they wanted three or more children; that plunged to 29 percent by 1973. More women were able to imagine a life that included both a family and a job, which changed their childbearing calculations,” writes Time Magazine reporter Nancy Gibbs.

Very quickly, the availability of the pill in America also resulted in huge advancements in women’s and infant health, and a decline in unwanted pregnancies- particularly in married women. The pill has played a key role in women’s ability to plan and space pregnancies, which has contributed to improved maternal, infant and family health.

  • From 1965 to 2005, the rate of maternal death declined by 52 percent (to 15.1 per 100,000 live births).
  • Unwanted pregnancies among married women have been cut by more than half, from one in five births in 1960-61 to just nine percent in 2002.
  • Births that occurred sooner than married women wanted declined from 45 percent in 1965 to 14 percent in 2002.

Today, 19 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 use the pill and more than 60 percent of women between 15 and 44 use birth control.  In 2010, too many pregnancies are still unintended. It is essential that the pill finally be available to all women in the United States, regardless of what kind of insurance they have or their ability to pay.