The Pill: The Untold Story of the Drug That Changed the World. - book reviews

National Review, June 26, 1995 by Maria McFadden

The Pill: The Untold Story of the Drug That Changed the World, by Bernard Asbell (Random House, 432 pp., $25) ALTHOUGH this biography of ``the Pill'' is at times an interesting read, in sum it is less an historical account than another piece of propaganda for ``choice.'' Bernard Asbell makes the pill and those who created it heroes (as well as Margaret Sanger, though he is at least honest about her advocacy of eugenics); the villains are Roman Catholics who opposed the pill, especially Pope Paul VI and his Humanae Vitae.

There is no discussion of the moral implications of the pill as seen in its fruits, such as legal abortion. Instead, RU486 is simply another pill; it's all a matter of hormone manipulation. Mr. Asbell does throw in a final chapter in which he pretends to grapple with the moral complexities of ``biointervention,'' but he has already decided in favor of ``medicine'' to both prevent life and hasten death, because ``bringing down the birth rate through the Pill or any other birth control'' may no longer be the ``cure for overpopulation'' if ``more and more people procrastinate in their obligation to die.''