Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's nineteen sixty four. NBC News anchorman David Brinkley
Speaker 1: has come to Boston to meet John Rock. Doctor Rock,
Speaker 1: who is seventy three years old, lives and works in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Speaker 1: Mainly he worked at his clinic or center, devoted to
Speaker 1: the study of human reproduction and the treatment of problems
Speaker 1: in an area of where when you get down to it,
Speaker 1: remarkably little is known. John Rock the most famous physician
Speaker 1: in the United States, co inventor of one of the
Speaker 1: most important drugs in human history, the birth control pill.
Speaker 1: He went to the High School of Commerce in Boston,
Speaker 1: to Harvard, to Harvard Medical School, interned at Massachusetts General Hospital,
Speaker 1: directed for thirty years of fertility clinic at the Free
Speaker 1: Hospital for Women, and now goes to mass every day
Speaker 1: at clan's Saint Mary's Church. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: or misunderstood. This is the second of three episodes on
Speaker 1: how to Think Like a Jesuit. This one is about
Speaker 1: John Rock's Great Dilemma. A man who went to Mass
Speaker 1: every day at Saint Mary's Catholic Church and then helped
Speaker 1: create the pill, something his church could not accept. One
Speaker 1: of the events would shape my later life to a
Speaker 1: great degree was an experience I had a father, Finnic,
Speaker 1: who was a cured in Marlborough. Rock is tall, distinguished,
Speaker 1: looks like Carrie Grant. His interview at Brinkley was over
Speaker 1: a century ago, so forgive the quality of the tape.
Speaker 1: I was just about fourteen and in walking out of
Speaker 1: Mars one Sunday when Father finnickback and me and asked
Speaker 1: me if I would like to drive down with him
Speaker 1: to visit the old folks home all we children called
Speaker 1: a poor fa Father Finnick was a quiet and unobtrusive man.
Speaker 1: When he was holding fourth the first Communion class or
Speaker 1: confirmation class, he put across what he intended us to
Speaker 1: learn with clarity and vigor, so that much of it
Speaker 1: has remained with me all my life. At this point,
Speaker 1: NBC shows b roll of a horse and carriage, something
Speaker 1: Rock would have ridden in his youth, and have added
Speaker 1: sound effects. God bless them. We had never been more
Speaker 1: than just friends, but some are remember quite distinctly that rider.
Speaker 1: He was sounding off saying, John, always stick to your
Speaker 1: own conscience. Let no one ever 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. I'm just as I
Speaker 1: was beginning to get that, and then there was a
Speaker 1: moment's pause, and then he said, and when I say
Speaker 1: no one, I mean no one. 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, et complicated. I don't feel like I
Speaker 1: ever really understood him all those years in those papers.
Speaker 1: I feel like I understood him partly, but I don't
Speaker 1: feel like I ever completely understood him. I went to
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia to talk to the two people
Speaker 1: who probably know more about John Rock than anyone else,
Speaker 1: Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, who wrote a book called
Speaker 1: The Fertility Doctor. It's the definitive account of rock life.
Speaker 1: You go first. I'm Margaret Marsh, and I'm a university professor.
Speaker 1: That's a title, university professor at Regers University. Yeah. I'm
Speaker 1: Wanda Ronner and I'm a gynecologist. I work for penn Medicine.
Speaker 1: I'm a professor of Clinical Obstetrics and gynecology, and I
Speaker 1: work at Pennsylvania Hospital. And your sisters, Where did you
Speaker 1: guys grow up around here? Is that why you're in
Speaker 1: this We grew up in Vineland, New Jersey. We grew
Speaker 1: up with our father's family, Italian Americans. We're the granddaughters
Speaker 1: of immigrants, and a lot of our families still there
Speaker 1: in Vineland. Oh see you, so I'm seeing your Catholic
Speaker 1: or we're many years ago, many years ago, I see.
Speaker 1: But this is not foreign territory for you, not at
Speaker 1: all to be talking about Catholics. Everyone in this episode
Speaker 1: is Catholic except for me. I'm a wannabe. Well, we
Speaker 1: always have this joke when people guess how we worked
Speaker 1: so well together, and we always say I always say
Speaker 1: I'm the oldest sister, so I get to be the boss,
Speaker 1: and she says I'm the younger sister, so I always
Speaker 1: get my way, Which is true. It is true. The
Speaker 1: two of them spent years on John Rock tracking down
Speaker 1: 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 or clothes.
Speaker 1: The overwhelming sorrow he felt for the women and their
Speaker 1: difficult situations was what decided him to go into obstetrics
Speaker 1: and gynecology. Rock founded the Fertility and Endocrine Clinic at
Speaker 1: the Free Hospital for Women in Brookline, where he served
Speaker 1: the Irish poor of Boston through the difficult ears of
Speaker 1: the Depression and the Second World War. He was never
Speaker 1: terribly interested in charging for his services. I think, and
Speaker 1: you know, okay, I love the man. What can I say?
Speaker 1: I think of him as an unusual figure in medicine,
Speaker 1: But you know, he had that gift of being able
Speaker 1: to communicate with women from all different classes. One of
Speaker 1: Rock's friends was a researcher pen named Luigi mastro Yani,
Speaker 1: who was still alive when the sisters were doing their work.
Speaker 1: It was Luigi who said he would come out. This
Speaker 1: was whether it was a clinic patient where private patient.
Speaker 1: He'd come out. He'd greet the patient, he'd walk her
Speaker 1: back in, sit her down, talk to her and always direct,
Speaker 1: you know, not he would always have a direct conversation
Speaker 1: with the patient, you know, like directly look at that minute.
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,
Speaker 1: a touch, a touch that's really good. Did you grow
Speaker 1: up Catholic too? Like I said, I want to be Catholic,
Speaker 1: not the real thing. That's very I think that is good.
Speaker 1: Doctors always have a touch of the parish priest, or
Speaker 1: the minister or the rabbi or because if you don't,
Speaker 1: you're less effective. And not to brag about my sister,
Speaker 1: but she does have the second highest patient satisfactory. That's all.
Speaker 1: That's all, it's mandatory to She's very she's very good, loved,
Speaker 1: she's one of the most beloved parish, one of the
Speaker 1: most loved. Your sister is allowed to boast about you.
Speaker 1: I don't know why you're why you're trying to stop her? 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 inestrian might be useful in combating infertility. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you. My conjecture was that, I think it
Speaker 1: came out of looking at the endometrium, you know, to
Speaker 1: seeing that some women did not have the secretory changes
Speaker 1: that would have been anticipated after ovulation. I think that
Speaker 1: makes sense because the way he would explain it, yes,
Speaker 1: was he said some women seemed to have underdeveloped systems.
Speaker 1: He sets systems, he underdeveloped reproductive systems, and he thought
Speaker 1: that this underdevelopment was due to a problem with the hormones.
Speaker 1: And this was all observation. Remember, they didn't know anything.
Speaker 1: I mean, they didn't you know, they didn't know the
Speaker 1: kinds of things we know now. So it's all observational lines.
Speaker 1: And he would say, some of them get pregnant on
Speaker 1: their own, and then after they get pregnant, once on
Speaker 1: their own, their systems quote seemed to be developed in
Speaker 1: the analogy of a car with a dead battery, Jump
Speaker 1: start the battery, and then after that the battery works.
Speaker 1: Think yes, so that's how Rock got interested in the
Speaker 1: role of hormones in reproduction. Meanwhile, fifty miles away in Worcester,
Speaker 1: a scientist named Gregory Pincas 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, when we went down, we had an
Speaker 1: appointer with the director of FDA or something like that,
Speaker 1: because all the material had been sent to Washington and
Speaker 1: no response. Tall distinguished John Rock, the Catholic Kerry Grant,
Speaker 1: the most famous doctor in America, knocked on the man's door.
Speaker 1: He had had all material, the right stack of stuff
Speaker 1: on it yet and he hadn't even looked at it.
Speaker 1: So we talked about it, and he said, well, he
Speaker 1: would go throw it as soon as he could, and
Speaker 1: I went over the then Tamna, you have no time,
Speaker 1: you'll do it now. And they said all right, and
Speaker 1: so he signed to what's ther call it? That was it?
Speaker 1: One of the two or three most important drugs of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century was approved. Is one of the drugs
Speaker 1: inventors took the train to Washington, marched into the FDA
Speaker 1: and said, you'll do it now that I probably the
Speaker 1: government in taking the final step, but we knew which
Speaker 1: was all right. I mean, I was convinced, My conscience
Speaker 1: was clear about that. How much do you love John Rock?
Speaker 1: But now John Rock has a problem. He's helped create
Speaker 1: the world's greatest contraceptive, and yet he's a devout Roman
Speaker 1: Catholic and his church doesn't believe in contraception. Consider the
Speaker 1: Kasti canoebe Papal encyclical of nineteen thirty. In it, Pope
Speaker 1: Pious the eleventh declared that and a quote, any use
Speaker 1: whatsoever of matrimony exercise in such a way that the
Speaker 1: act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate
Speaker 1: life is an offense against the law of God and
Speaker 1: of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded
Speaker 1: with the guilt of a grave sin. The act is
Speaker 1: deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life. That's
Speaker 1: what a contraceptive does. And what is John Rock's birth
Speaker 1: control pill. It is a pill that deliberately frustrates the
Speaker 1: natural power to generate life. Let's run to John ROC's options.
Speaker 1: He could renounce his work on the pill and accept
Speaker 1: the teaching of the church. Only he's not going to
Speaker 1: do that, is he He remembers what his priest told
Speaker 1: him when he was a boy, John Always stick to
Speaker 1: your own conscience. Let no one ever keep it for you.
Speaker 1: Margaret Martian wander Or tell the story in their book
Speaker 1: of when Roc was nineteen and he got a job
Speaker 1: with the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. He was responsible
Speaker 1: for a group of Jamaican migrant workers when United Fruit
Speaker 1: decided to cut everyone's wages. And who did Rock support
Speaker 1: his workers? He just defied all the bosses that United
Speaker 1: Fruit and he said, they don't need a wage cut.
Speaker 1: There's no reason for a wage cut. I'm not cutting
Speaker 1: the wages on my farm. Kind of Anny of Coursie.
Speaker 1: They cut the wages on his farm. Then there's this
Speaker 1: huge strike and he says, well, he writes to the
Speaker 1: president of the companies, this is ridiculous. If you were
Speaker 1: here you would know that this is wrong. They don't
Speaker 1: need a wage cut. And then there's the strike and
Speaker 1: one of the Jamaican workers is very gravely injured and
Speaker 1: two of the others aren't. He's like nineteen years old.
Speaker 1: He wades into this wildcat strike, gets the injured men,
Speaker 1: brings them to the hospital. And you wonder, where does
Speaker 1: the nineteen year old, who's probably never had a deep
Speaker 1: thought about racial injustice in his life, where does he
Speaker 1: get that reservoir? John Rock always kept his own conscience.
Speaker 1: Many years later, in his dilemma over the church and
Speaker 1: the birth control of Hill, he had another option. Of course,
Speaker 1: he could leave the church. Lots of people have left
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church over disagreements with its teachings. But Rock
Speaker 1: can't leave the Catholic Church. Are you kidding me? Leaving
Speaker 1: Catholicism would have I don't think he would have ever
Speaker 1: thought of it. Well, I know there was a little
Speaker 1: line that you quoted from I think one of his
Speaker 1: diaries about a day where he said he attended Mass
Speaker 1: in three different churches in one day. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: that gives you a flavor of I suppose of the culture.
Speaker 1: His mother was devout. His mother was very different. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of my colleagues, who's a James Joyce scholar, told
Speaker 1: me about a line in one of James Joyce's book
Speaker 1: where the hero and his friend are walking around. Then
Speaker 1: one of them is saying to the other one, I've
Speaker 1: lost my faith, man, I've lost my faith. And so
Speaker 1: the other one says, are you going to become a Protestant?
Speaker 1: And he says, I lost my faith. Man, I didn't
Speaker 1: tell you I lost my mind. And that's very John Rock.
Speaker 1: So he's not going to put his head down and
Speaker 1: go along, and he's not going to abandon the church.
Speaker 1: That leaves only one option. He's going to stay and
Speaker 1: try to convince the church to change its mind. Now,
Speaker 1: how do you do that if you're a devout Catholic
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties. The answer is you think like
Speaker 1: a Jesuit. Let's leave John Rock for a moment and
Speaker 1: let me run a thought experiment by you. It comes
Speaker 1: out of a conversation I had with a scientist named
Speaker 1: Kurt Barnard. He's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: Medical Center in Philadelphia, an ob gyn who does research
Speaker 1: in reproductive biology. Barnhart's kind of a modern day verse
Speaker 1: of John Rock. Only now we know a lot more
Speaker 1: about female reproduction than we did in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: I mean to insult you with a student level lecture,
Speaker 1: but you know progesterone is pulling the plug out from
Speaker 1: the street to turn the lights off in your house.
Speaker 1: It's not turning the lamp off on your bedstand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're still trapped, in other words, in a relatively crude
Speaker 1: conceptual model about how to prevent Yeah, right right, And
Speaker 1: it would be better if you could prevent opulation. I
Speaker 1: mean the home run I'll share the Nobel Prize with
Speaker 1: you would be there's an atresia of eggs with women's aging.
Speaker 1: If I could stop women's eggs from growing and not
Speaker 1: losing them, not only would I prevent I would allow
Speaker 1: you to get pregnant what you want. I would remove
Speaker 1: the biological clock and you could get pregnant at sixty right.
Speaker 1: So I mean, I mean you could decouple the aging
Speaker 1: of a woman's eggs from the regular aging process. Is that?
Speaker 1: What is that? Theoretically? I mean, luckularly, a woman is
Speaker 1: born with all the eggs that she ever makes, and
Speaker 1: they're all sitting in the ovary and what's really neat
Speaker 1: is and we don't understand this. But one month, a
Speaker 1: group of eggs starts growing and competing. That's the one
Speaker 1: that ovulates, and all the other ones die off. When
Speaker 1: you run out of groups, you ran out of menopause.
Speaker 1: But we don't understand what tells the group to grow.
Speaker 1: So if we could say, don't throw your follicle this month,
Speaker 1: throw it next month, putting it on pause. Right, a
Speaker 1: woman is born with a fixed number of eggs. You
Speaker 1: don't make any new ones. By puberty, you might have
Speaker 1: three hundred to four hundred thousand eggs, and every month,
Speaker 1: like clockwork, you lose about a thousand of them. That's
Speaker 1: the iron logic of female fertility. But Barnhardt says, we
Speaker 1: might have found a drug that would allow a woman
Speaker 1: to stop the clock, to hit pause. It's being developed
Speaker 1: by several of his colleagues, Kara Goldman at Northwestern among them.
Speaker 1: It's called m tour. Now understand that this approach, under
Speaker 1: the best of circumstances, is years and years away from
Speaker 1: ever becoming available. That's why this is a thought experiment.
Speaker 1: So here's the question. Is emptor a contraceptive? I wouldn't
Speaker 1: pitch it as contraception. I wouldn't. I would. I would
Speaker 1: pitch it as delay, you know where. It's not like
Speaker 1: I'm trying to not get pregnant today. I need a
Speaker 1: contraceptive right, I mean no, Let's go, Wow, this is interesting, right, um,
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 how would the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church view such a measure? They are opposed to artificial contraception,
Speaker 1: but what if this is not? Is this plausibly not contraception? Yeah?
Speaker 1: 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, emptor is obviously something that
Speaker 1: allows a woman to have sex without the possibility of
Speaker 1: getting pregnant. You take a pill and you knower ovulate.
Speaker 1: As the Pope wrote in nineteen thirty, those who indulge
Speaker 1: in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.
Speaker 1: How is the pope when to agree with emptor? But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, well, you could say that this
Speaker 1: is a way of controlling your aging, or postponing or
Speaker 1: prophylaxing or being sure. But I'm open to having a family,
Speaker 1: and I'm open to life, and I'm opened later. It's
Speaker 1: just it's just not right now. So that may be
Speaker 1: a plausible argument if you look at it that way.
Speaker 1: Emptor is actually not a means to suppress your fertility,
Speaker 1: but it means to extend your fertility. How is the
Speaker 1: pope going to have a problem with a mechanism that
Speaker 1: allows women to have more children later in life? If
Speaker 1: this way of thinking sounds familiar, it should. Barnard is
Speaker 1: doing a nice little bit of casuistry here, the kind
Speaker 1: of thinking we described in the previous episode. Casuistry, remember,
Speaker 1: begins with a descent into the particular, What exactly am
Speaker 1: I dealing with? Well, a drug that effectively freezes your
Speaker 1: eggs inside your own body. Then casuistry involves an exercise
Speaker 1: in taxonomy. Where does this new case fit in relation
Speaker 1: to existing cases? And Barnhart's point is that emptor is
Speaker 1: often the corner with fertility drugs, not over here with
Speaker 1: the traditional contraceptives. Barnhart said that the first thing his
Speaker 1: group is going to try and do is a study
Speaker 1: with women who are undergoing chemotherapy because chemotherapy, in many
Speaker 1: cases destroys a woman's eggs, not all of them in
Speaker 1: some cases. Yeah, are you serious? Chemotherapy is designed to
Speaker 1: kill dividing cells, and by definition, right, that's what it's killing.
Speaker 1: And it also kills many other slowly dividing cells. That's
Speaker 1: why you get gi upset and you lose your hair.
Speaker 1: But it also kills women's eggs. So one of the
Speaker 1: consequence intour could stop, could stop the development of the
Speaker 1: eggs such that they're no longer receptive to the chemotherapy
Speaker 1: by hitting pause on the whole thing, right, Oh, I 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 Barnhart
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, Emptor 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 live 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 unstone tablets. They are things
Speaker 1: that have to be negotiated. Casuistry is a method of
Speaker 1: doing that negotiation. You see you're a Catholic. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I struggle with that. Do I know more scientifically
Speaker 1: in the popes to sure? Does that allow me to
Speaker 1: get different interpretations? I don't know. You are in a
Speaker 1: line of research that if the Pope were here sitting
Speaker 1: in his chair, he would disagree with what you do
Speaker 1: for a living. 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: thirty when he referred to methods that frustrate the natural
Speaker 1: power to generate life. On the other hand, though, there
Speaker 1: was the rhythm method. Rhythm is the idea that a
Speaker 1: couple might prevent pregnancy by not having sex during a
Speaker 1: woman's fertile days when she's ovulating in nenteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: Pope 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. His statement on the
Speaker 1: rhythm method, how does he resolve the issue of whether
Speaker 1: the whether the rhythm method is contraception or not? Oh,
Speaker 1: I just by ignoring it. That's a time lunered way
Speaker 1: of solving problems. That's the historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler, who
Speaker 1: wrote a brilliant book on the Church's history with contraception.
Speaker 1: He's speaking to Italian midwives, the Congress of Italian Midwives,
Speaker 1: and I presume what it reflects is the reality of
Speaker 1: war tour in Italy, you know, of a country that's
Speaker 1: really been desmated, where people are desperately poor. So, in
Speaker 1: a fact, he's saying, I know you're phasing problems out there.
Speaker 1: And here is mother Church's pastoral response. So there are
Speaker 1: some kinds of birth control the Catholic churches, okay, with
Speaker 1: natural kinds, and there are some kinds. It opposes artificial kinds.
Speaker 1: But let's descend into the particulars here for a moment.
Speaker 1: It's not quite true that the rhythm method is perfectly natural,
Speaker 1: at least not as it was being practiced in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. Walk the naive listener through what practicing the
Speaker 1: rhythm method of fifties met, right, Well, it was new
Speaker 1: and improved rhythm in the fifties, and in the beginning,
Speaker 1: you just you sort of looked at the calendar. You
Speaker 1: assume that your menstrual period would occur at such and
Speaker 1: such a point in the cycle, and there'd be no variations,
Speaker 1: so you just count. Right. This doesn't work very well
Speaker 1: at preventing pregnancy. The one that dominates in these is
Speaker 1: the so called basal temperature method, whereby apparently when a
Speaker 1: woman opulates, there'll be a very slight increase in her
Speaker 1: body temperature. But that means that every morning you have
Speaker 1: to take your temperature rectily, because that's the most sensitive way,
Speaker 1: and recorded before you get out of bed, before you
Speaker 1: do anything, which is not always easy if you already
Speaker 1: have a houseful of young children. Yes, you had seven
Speaker 1: kids screaming and you're taking your temperature, that's right, which
Speaker 1: in the screaming might I should think have caused your
Speaker 1: temperature to rise? For only independent reasons Teler is Catholic,
Speaker 1: of course, and as someone who grew up in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, this is a world she knew. Intimately. I'm
Speaker 1: married into a family where my husband's considerably older brothers,
Speaker 1: who'd had their kids in the forties and fifties, had
Speaker 1: ten and twelve each. His only sister, very sensibly joined
Speaker 1: a religious order and only left after her reproductive years
Speaker 1: were over, although I don't really think that was her motivation,
Speaker 1: but who can tell. Birth control was a big part
Speaker 1: of what Catholics talked and thought about in those years,
Speaker 1: and Rock is right in the middle of that obsession.
Speaker 1: He actually runs a rhythm method clinic in Boston. He's
Speaker 1: one of the researchers who helps establish when in a
Speaker 1: woman's cycle ovulation occurs. That's how he makes his reputation.
Speaker 1: So after John Rock gets FDA approval for his birth
Speaker 1: control pill, he writes a best selling book called The
Speaker 1: Time Has Come, where he does a brilliant bit of casuistry.
Speaker 1: Is the pill more like a classic artificial method like
Speaker 1: the condom? Or is it more of a semi natural
Speaker 1: method like rhythm? And ROC's answer in his book is
Speaker 1: the pill is like rhythm. It uses the very same
Speaker 1: hormones found in a woman's body, estrogen and progesterone. And
Speaker 1: what does it do. It mimics pregnancy, which is the
Speaker 1: most natural of states. The chemical subscript in these pills
Speaker 1: acts in the body exactly like progesterone to the mother's
Speaker 1: over reproducers. It's Rock again explaining the science to David Brinkley.
Speaker 1: And it has the same effect on the regulating mechanism
Speaker 1: for ripening eggs and for the releasing eggs. If if
Speaker 1: a woman takes the pill month after month after month
Speaker 1: and continuously not missing any day at all, she is
Speaker 1: in effect establishing just a pseudo pregnancy. It may believe
Speaker 1: pregnancy early on. Leslie Tatler says, many people in the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church, important people, theologians, church leaders, sided with Rock's argument.
Speaker 1: All the language, all the logic of Catholic teaching uncontraception
Speaker 1: presumes a barrier method, you know, kind of intervening in
Speaker 1: the midst of this act. I think many of them
Speaker 1: see the pill as something completely different. You take the
Speaker 1: pill in the morning, It has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: the sexual act unless you're in a very unusual relationship
Speaker 1: and you don't have to mess about in the genital area.
Speaker 1: You don't have to think about interrupting the sex act.
Speaker 1: It's great stuff. You know, it's psychologically unhooked from all
Speaker 1: the messiness of traditional contraception, and I think theologians into
Speaker 1: it that this might be a way to pry the
Speaker 1: whole thing open, to at least create a debate where
Speaker 1: at least officially none can exist. It helps that roc
Speaker 1: is who he is, a doctor on the front lines,
Speaker 1: who's been serving the Catholic poor of Boston his whole career,
Speaker 1: listening to the troubles of women who had eight children
Speaker 1: and too many miscarriages to count all by the time
Speaker 1: they were thirty. The cardinals and the Pope were the
Speaker 1: front lines like he was. They were sitting celibate behind
Speaker 1: the walls of the Vatican. We take John Paul a
Speaker 1: second for example. We're leaping ahead a bit from the
Speaker 1: sixties here, but you know it's still the sixties issues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all his talks on theology of the body, which are
Speaker 1: lovely and lyrical and also make the case for not
Speaker 1: using a contraception, But when you finish reading them, which
Speaker 1: is hard, you come away with a sense that he's
Speaker 1: not talking about real bodies, you know, not bodies that
Speaker 1: get tired, that get hungry, that ache to love someone,
Speaker 1: that can have too many children, that can't get pregnant
Speaker 1: right now. But it's ye, that's the weird thing that
Speaker 1: you have this incredibly intimate discussion of female reproduction done
Speaker 1: by essentially middle age Selivan men. Yeah, exactly. And you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of the men I interviewed, because they were
Speaker 1: ordained in the forties and the fifties, some even in
Speaker 1: the late thirties, they had gone to seminary at the
Speaker 1: age of fourteen. And I really think that many of them,
Speaker 1: certainly during the period of upheaval around birth control I
Speaker 1: had themselves not had sexual experience. One of them said
Speaker 1: to me, he said, you know, when I was a
Speaker 1: young priest, I really hated for anyone to confess to
Speaker 1: sexual sin because I didn't know what I was talking about.
Speaker 1: In response to ROC'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 soften
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 roc
Speaker 1: because he was a conservative, but he was also a Jesuit.
Speaker 1: Funny thing happens is that Fuchs, while he's on the committee,
Speaker 1: starts listening to the late people on the commission, and
Speaker 1: the late people start talking in a way that they're
Speaker 1: entertaining particularities that he never entertained. That's father Keenan, who
Speaker 1: he met in the previous episode The Jesuit Scholar in Rome.
Speaker 1: Only the married couple fully understands that, as a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, this husband or this mother is going to
Speaker 1: lose their job. They have to take care of this,
Speaker 1: They can't stay at home. All of a sudden, all
Speaker 1: these different issues are not being entertained, and he realizes,
Speaker 1: we have to be teaching people how to make judgments
Speaker 1: and conscience because they're going to have circumstances that we
Speaker 1: can never anticipate, and they're going to have the better
Speaker 1: ability than we who don't have that information. There are
Speaker 1: too many cases and too many particulars. So in the end,
Speaker 1: Fuchs says that the decision ought to lie with the
Speaker 1: wife and the husband. The birth control is a case
Speaker 1: that each Catholic must decide for herself. He's teaching that
Speaker 1: you don't need to go to a priest for a casuist,
Speaker 1: you have to become a casuist. That's what he's doing.
Speaker 1: For two years. Pope Paul six pondered the commission's findings. Finally,
Speaker 1: in the Humane Vite 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 1: He starts as day reading and answering mail critical and
Speaker 1: otherwise from readers of his book advocating the birth condrol pill.
Speaker 1: David Brinkley sat with him in his office and they
Speaker 1: reenacted his daily ritual. John Rock holds a letter in
Speaker 1: his hands. Your article in the magazines in regard to
Speaker 1: birth control as rather nauseating. Did you ever think of
Speaker 1: the day you would meet your God an account for
Speaker 1: your work while on earth. I can hardly believe that
Speaker 1: you or anyone else can interfere with a divine natural law.
Speaker 1: God will provide. I am. I'm sorry I have set
Speaker 1: Joe stomach. You may be very sure that I've gone
Speaker 1: through some inner pains myself. Oh there's problem that I
Speaker 1: a I'm so concerned with. For John Rock, his obligation
Speaker 1: as a Catholic was never to the mute enforcement of
Speaker 1: natural law. He went into the tenements of Boston remember
Speaker 1: and felt overwhelming sorrow. As far as meeting my God,
Speaker 1: I have. I've been taught him. I believe that he's
Speaker 1: here with me all the time, as I have to
Speaker 1: meet him every day. I really tried to conformed what
Speaker 1: he tells him. Here's the thing to do. He shared
Speaker 1: the obligation of the Jesuits to console those in need
Speaker 1: of consolation. Perhaps I'm a little hardly hearing at times,
Speaker 1: but I do my best. As wander Runners said, I
Speaker 1: think I love the man. Revisionist History is produced by
Speaker 1: mil La Belle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact
Speaker 1: checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kane,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Wesburg. Revisionist history is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. Him Malcolm Gladwell