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By Root 6843 0

fertilization and the freezing of sperm cells, and was the first to extract an intact fertilized egg. The Pill was his crowning achievement. His two collaborators, Gregory Pincus and Min-Cheuh Chang, worked out the mechanism. He shepherded the drug through its clinical trials. “It was his name and his reputation that gave ultimate validity to the claims that the pill would protect women against unwanted pregnancy,” Loretta McLaughlin writes in her marvelous 1982 biography of Rock. Not long before the Pill’s approval, Rock traveled to Washington to testify before the FDA about the drug’s safety. The agency examiner, Pasquale DeFelice, was a Catholic obstetrician from Georgetown University, and at one point, the story goes, DeFelice suggested the unthinkable — that the Catholic Church would never approve of the birth-control pill. “I can still see Rock standing there, his face composed, his eyes riveted on DeFelice,” a colleague recalled years later, “and then, in a voice that would congeal your soul, he said, ‘Young man, don’t you sell my church short.’ ”

In the end, of course, John Rock’s church disappointed him. In 1968, in the encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” Pope Paul VI outlawed oral contraceptives and all other “artificial” methods of birth control. The passion and urgency that animated the birth-control debates of the sixties are now a memory. John Rock still matters, though, for the simple reason that in the course of reconciling his church and his work he made an error. It was not a deliberate error. It became manifest only after his death, and through scientific advances he could not have anticipated. But because that mistake shaped the way he thought about the Pill — about what it was, and how it worked, and most of all what it meant — and because John Rock was one of those responsible for the way the Pill came into the world, his error has colored the way people have thought about contraception ever since.

John Rock believed that the Pill was a “natural” method of birth control. By that, he didn’t mean that it felt natural, because it obviously didn’t for many women, particularly not in its earliest days, when the doses of hormone were many times as high as they are today. He meant that it worked by natural means. Women can get pregnant only during a certain interval each month, because after ovulation their bodies produce a surge of the hormone progesterone. Progesterone — one of a class of hormones known as progestin — prepares the uterus for implantation and stops the ovaries from releasing new eggs; it favors gestation. “It is progesterone, in the healthy woman, that prevents ovulation and establishes the pre- and postmenstrual ‘safe’ period,” Rock wrote. When a woman is pregnant, her body produces a stream of progestin in part for the same reason, so that another egg can’t be released and threaten the pregnancy already under way. Progestin, in other words, is nature’s contraceptive. And what was the Pill? Progestin in tablet form. When a woman was on the Pill, of course, these hormones weren’t coming in a sudden surge after ovulation and weren’t limited to certain times in her cycle. They were being given in a steady dose, so that ovulation was permanently shut down. They were also being given with an additional dose of estrogen, which holds the endometrium together and — as we’ve come to learn — helps maintain other tissues as well. But to Rock, the timing and combination of hormones wasn’t the issue. The key fact was that the Pill’s ingredients duplicated what could be found in the body naturally. And in that naturalness he saw enormous theological significance.

In 1951, for example, Pope Pius XII had sanctioned the rhythm method for Catholics because he deemed it a “natural” method of regulating procreation: it didn’t kill the sperm, like a spermicide, or frustrate the normal process of procreation, like a diaphragm, or mutilate the organs, like sterilization. Rock knew all about the rhythm method. In the 1930s, at the Free Hospital for Women, in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had started the country’s first