CARL DJERASSI will be immortalised for the invention that liberated women: the Pill. The Viennese-born scientist, playwright, novelist and poet was the chemist who led the American team that synthesised the first oral contraceptive in 1951 by developing nature’s contraceptive, progesterone. This year a postage stamp has been issued in his honour in Austria, the country from which he and his Jewish physician parents fled in 1939, and next month he will to travel to Cambridge to receive his twentieth honorary doctorate.
Of the three-person team which developed the Pill, the dapper-looking Professor Djerassi is the only one still alive. Urbane and woman-friendly, he describes himself as an intellectual polygamist, a male feminist and the “mother” of the Pill. The latest scare about the Pill causing a loss of libido is, he says, nothing new, referring me to a website that mentions a 1979 article on the very same subject.
“People talk about the Pill as if there is only one, but this is not one homogenous compound: there are several thousand formulations, all based on five or six active ingredients,” he points out. “With 80-100 million women worldwide taking an oral contraceptive, you are going to find every form of side-effect, and women often find it helpful to switch types of Pills. I’m the first to say that neither the Pill nor any other method is the ideal contraceptive for all women, because there are too many factors involved. But the libido is not just a question of SHBG (a protein that lowers testerone drives, and thereby reduces desire), because removing the fear of unwanted pregnancy by taking the Pill in the first place has had an enormous positive effect on the libido.”
Indeed it has, so much so that Professor Djerassi has been dubbed the father of free love. It’s a description that exasperates him, since he prefers to think of his invention as empowering women to take their full place in society. “I believe in men taking control of their own fertility, too,” adds Professor Djerassi, who had a vasectomy after the birth of his two children, Dale and Pamela, by his second wife. Pamela, an artist who suffered from depression, committed suicide in 1975. “I never thought I would survive one of my children, and now suddenly coming to terms with likely widowhood is horrible,” confides Professor Djerassi, whose third wife, the biographer Diane Middlebrook, has ovarian cancer. “My wife is very ill; but whenever disaster has struck, such as my cancer or my daughter’s suicide, my therapy is to bury myself in work.”
Although the couple’s main home is in San Francisco, Professor Djerassi is inclined to spend more time in Europe. (He is in London for the run of his latest play.) “Fundamentalism in America is more than worrying, it’s scary. America is a Puritan and yet most prurient nation. You can count the pubic hairs on a woman on US television but not see anyone put on a condom, because that’s not allowed; what an irony,” he says.
Being demonised by opponents of contraception as the destroyer of the nuclear family holds no terrors for him. “Baloney,” he says succinctly. “Planned parenthood strengthens the understanding of joint parenting rather than the traditional separate roles of father and mother.” He considers the women’s movement to be “the most significant movement of the last 40 years”. As the only child of divorced parents, it always seemed to him that a working mother was the most natural thing in the world. And he believes his second career as a writer, where he focuses on the human dilemmas in scientific discoveries, has given him a particular empathy with women. “Most scientists pay relatively little attention to the social implications of their work; the development of the oral contraceptive changed me for ever.”
Yet he is aware of the problem of balancing women’s right to self-fulfilment with the necessity for society to renew its numbers. “The problem in Europe is that women give birth to an average of 1.5 children, whereas in a country such as Pakistan the average number is five or six. We have to find a solution to our pension crisis of an ageing population through intelligent immigration.”
Already he can see a future where IVF is available for the fertile as well as the infertile, which would render his great invention redundant. “We have the means of not dying out as a society by presenting women with the option of extending their biological clock so that they can have a baby at 45 after freezing their eggs. But I would put an upper limit on having babies — a 60-year-old woman giving birth is one of those horror scenarios.” He acknowledges the problem over the viability of frozen eggs, but suspects that “it will be solved in the next ten years”.
Professor Djerassi, who is 82 in October, is working furiously on his next play, When Harriet Met Sally. “I’m in such a frenzy now because of my age, so I write a play a year,” he explains. “It’s the story of a lesbian couple who persuade the brother of one of them to be a sperm donor. With lesbians, anything is possible. As men, we are totally unimportant: we contribute one sperm and we finish.
“Contraception . . . is where the power relationship between men and women will change. Every child produced by assisted reproduction will be a wanted child: it will empower women with the ultimate choice.”
