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By Root 8595 0

“Not since the Copernicans suggested in the sixteenth century that the sun was the center of the planetary system has the Roman Catholic Church found itself on such a perilous collision course with a new body of knowledge,” the article concluded. Paul VI, however, was unmoved. He stalled, delaying a verdict for months, and then years. Some said he fell under the sway of conservative elements within the Vatican. In the interim, theologians began exposing the holes in Rock’s arguments. The rhythm method “ ‘prevents’ conception by abstinence, that is, by the non-performance of the conjugal act during the fertile period,” the Catholic journal America concluded in a 1964 editorial. “The Pill prevents conception by suppressing ovulation and by thus abolishing the fertile period. No amount of word juggling can make abstinence from sexual relations and the suppression of ovulation one and the same thing.” On July 29, 1968, in the “Humanae Vitae” encyclical, the Pope broke his silence, declaring all “artificial” methods of contraception to be against the teachings of the Church.

In hindsight, it is possible to see the opportunity that Rock missed. If he had known what we know now and had talked about the Pill not as a contraceptive but as a cancer drug — not as a drug to prevent life but as one that would save life — the Church might well have said yes. Hadn’t Pius XII already approved the Pill for therapeutic purposes? Rock would only have had to think of the Pill as Pike thinks of it: as a drug whose contraceptive aspects are merely a means of attracting users, of getting, as Pike put it, “people who are young to take a lot of stuff they wouldn’t otherwise take.”

But Rock did not live long enough to understand how things might have been. What he witnessed, instead, was the terrible time at the end of the sixties when the Pill suddenly stood accused — wrongly — of causing blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks. Between the midseventies and the early eighties, the number of women in the United States using the Pill fell by half. Harvard Medical School, meanwhile, took over Rock’s Reproductive Clinic and pushed him out. His Harvard pension paid him only seventy-five dollars a year. He had almost no money in the bank and had to sell his house in Brookline. In 1971, Rock left Boston and retreated to a farmhouse in the hills of New Hampshire. He swam in the stream behind the house. He listened to John Philip Sousa marches. In the evening, he would sit in the living room with a pitcher of martinis. In 1983, he gave his last public interview, and it was as if the memory of his achievements were now so painful that he had blotted it out.

He was asked what the most gratifying time of his life was. “Right now,” the inventor of the Pill answered, incredibly. He was sitting by the fire in a crisp white shirt and tie, reading The Origin, Irving Stone’s fictional account of the life of Darwin. “It frequently occurs to me, gosh, what a lucky guy I am. I have no responsibilities, and I have everything I want. I take a dose of equanimity every twenty minutes. I will not be disturbed about things.”

Once, John Rock had gone to seven-o’clock Mass every morning and kept a crucifix above his desk. His interviewer, the writer Sara Davidson, moved her chair closer to his and asked him whether he still believed in an afterlife.

“Of course I don’t,” Rock answered abruptly. Though he didn’t explain why, his reasons aren’t hard to imagine. The Church could not square the requirements of its faith with the results of his science, and if the Church couldn’t reconcile them, how could Rock be expected to? John Rock always stuck to his conscience, and in the end his conscience forced him away from the thing he loved most. This was not John Rock’s error. Nor was it his Church’s. It was the fault of the haphazard nature of science, which all too often produces progress in advance of understanding. If the order of events in the discovery of what was natural had been reversed, his world, and our world, too, would have been a different place.

“Heaven and Hell,