Chemical Feminism

An Essay

In 2009, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers published a study through the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.”[1] Their findings cut against the expected narrative. Despite fifty years of gains in education, workforce participation, legal equality, and reproductive control, American women reported declining subjective well-being—both in absolute terms and relative to men. In the 1970s, women rated their overall life satisfaction higher than men. By the late 2000s, this had reversed.

The decline appeared across demographic categories. Stevenson and Wolfers found that “women of all education groups have become less happy over time with declines in happiness having been steepest among those with some college.” They also found that “on average, women are less happy with their marriage than men and women have become less happy with their marriage over time.”[1] Data from the American Sociological Association indicates that women initiate approximately 70 percent of divorces, a figure that rises to roughly 90 percent among college-educated women.[2]

Related indicators point in the same direction. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that more than one in five American women receive a mental health diagnosis during their lifetime, with women experiencing depression at twice the rate of men.[3] CDC data shows disordered alcohol use among American women more than doubled between 2002 and 2013.[4] Suicide rates among young women have increased substantially over the past two decades.[5]

The standard explanations—incomplete liberation on one side, family breakdown on the other—fail to account for the pattern. Neither explains why unhappiness correlates so closely with feminist “progress,” nor why the women who most thoroughly embrace the feminist life script show the steepest declines.

Something else changed in the 1960s. The birth control pill arrived in 1960 and became the most commonly used contraceptive in America within a decade. Approximately 82 percent of American women have used the Pill at some point, with over 60 percent currently using some form of hormonal contraception.[6]

The argument developed here is that feminism as lived social transformation—not as ideology but as the actual restructuring of how women live, work, and form relationships—depended on this chemical intervention. The Pill did more than prevent pregnancy. It altered female psychology in ways that made feminist behavior patterns feel natural and self-reinforcing. Before the Pill, feminist ideas existed for over a century without achieving mass adoption. After the Pill, they became the new normal within a generation.

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The Stress Response

Sarah Hill, an evolutionary psychologist at Texas Christian University, describes discovering the Pill’s effects on stress responses by accident. At a research conference, a colleague mentioned he had excluded women on oral contraceptives from his stress study because, although they reported feeling stressed, “they didn’t experience any changes in cortisol.”[7] The Pill-taking women showed no physiological stress response despite subjective distress.

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis governs stress responses in humans. Stressors trigger a hormonal cascade that culminates in cortisol release from the adrenal glands. Cortisol mobilizes energy, sharpens attention, and helps encode experiences into memory. This system enables learning from threats and adapting to challenges.

Multiple studies have documented disrupted HPA function in Pill users. When exposed to standardized laboratory stressors—the Trier Social Stress Test, exhausting exercise, pharmacological challenge—naturally cycling women show the expected two- to threefold increase in salivary cortisol.[8] Women on the Pill often show blunted responses, absent responses, or paradoxical decreases.[9][10][11]

The dysfunction extends beyond acute responses. Pill users show flattened daily cortisol rhythms, with lower morning peaks and less variation throughout the day.[12] They have difficulty metabolizing externally administered cortisol.[13] Research by Hertel and colleagues found that Pill users exhibited biological markers typically associated with chronic stress: altered patterns in cortisol-related cellular activity (what conventional biology describes as gene expression), elevated blood lipids, reduced hippocampal volume, and patterns suggesting the HPA axis is attempting to shut itself down.[14]

This pattern resembles what researchers observe in populations who have experienced chronic stress or trauma. The Pill triggers such sustained HPA activation that the body initiates coordinated shutdown. Cortisol plays critical roles in learning, memory encoding, and emotional regulation. The hippocampus is particularly vulnerable to chronic cortisol exposure; reduced hippocampal volume connects to documented memory and learning differences in this population.[15]

Hill describes her own experience of stopping the Pill as going “from grayscale to full color.”[7] This subjective report aligns with the documented physiology: suppressed stress response systems dampen emotional engagement with the world.

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Related Essays

Interview with Janice Fiamengo

The Feminist War on Human Nature

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Feminist Charlatan

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Mate Preferences

The Pill works by providing synthetic hormones that suppress ovulation. These hormones create an endocrine environment resembling early pregnancy—a state with distinct psychological characteristics.

Researchers working within evolutionary psychology offer one interpretation of why this matters. In their framework, a pregnant woman’s adaptive challenges differ from those of a woman who might become pregnant. She no longer needs to identify and attract a mate—that task is complete. Instead, she needs stability, protection, and support. Her psychology should shift accordingly: away from risk-taking and novelty-seeking, toward security and familiar relationships. Whether or not one accepts evolutionary explanations, the observed preference shifts during pregnancy and across the menstrual cycle are well-documented.

During the natural menstrual cycle, preferences shift with hormonal changes. Near ovulation, when estrogen peaks and conception is possible, women show heightened sensitivity to certain male characteristics: more masculine faces, deeper voices, socially dominant behavior.[16][17] During the follicular phase, women also show increased preference for men with symmetrical features. After ovulation, during the progesterone-dominant luteal phase, preferences shift toward indicators of investment and stability—characteristics associated with long-term partnership rather than short-term attraction.[18]

The Pill eliminates this cyclicity. Without hormonal fluctuation, Pill users show consistent preferences resembling the luteal pattern: attraction to less masculine men with less masculine features.[19][20] The fertile-phase sensitivity to masculine characteristics disappears.

Little and colleagues tested this directly in a study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology. Women used software to create ideal male faces by adjusting masculinity markers—jaw height, cheekbone prominence, face width. Half then started the Pill while the other half served as controls. Three months later, both groups completed the task again. Controls showed no preference change. Women who had started the Pill created significantly less masculine ideal faces than before—for both ideal long-term and short-term partners. The effect was specific to male faces; their ideal female faces remained unchanged.[21]

A follow-up examined actual partners rather than hypothetical preferences. Researchers photographed male partners of women who had been on the Pill when they met versus women who had been naturally cycling. Independent raters assessed the men’s facial masculinity, and researchers measured objective masculinity markers: cheekbone prominence, the ratio of jaw height to lower-face height, and the ratio of face height to width. The men chosen by Pill users had objectively and subjectively less masculine faces.[21]

Research on MHC (major histocompatibility complex) reveals another potential disruption. Within the framework of conventional immunology, MHC refers to a set of molecules involved in immune function—determining which pathogens the immune system recognizes. Researchers working within this paradigm have found that naturally cycling women prefer the scent of men with MHC profiles dissimilar to their own—a preference they interpret as promoting immune diversity in offspring.[22] Whether or not one accepts the standard genetic interpretation, the preference pattern itself has been documented across multiple studies.

Roberts and colleagues found that starting the Pill shifted preferences toward MHC-similar men. This was a longitudinal design: the same women were tested before and after starting the Pill, with a control group tested at similar intervals. The preference shift occurred only in women who started the Pill.[23] Whatever the underlying mechanism, the behavioral change is real.

The downstream consequences are substantial. MHC-similar couples report lower sexual satisfaction and higher interest in extra-pair relationships.[24] Some research suggests elevated miscarriage rates, though this remains contested. If the Pill systematically steers women toward MHC-similar partners, it undermines relationship satisfaction regardless of how one interprets the biological mechanism.

Survey data on relationship satisfaction aligns with these concerns. Roberts and colleagues surveyed over two thousand women with at least one child, asking about relationship quality with the father. Women who chose partners while on the Pill reported lower sexual satisfaction across multiple measures—sexual attraction to their partner, sexual satisfaction in the relationship, frequency of sexual activity. However, they reported higher satisfaction with non-sexual aspects: financial provision, faithfulness, and partnership in non-romantic domains.[25] Naturally cycling women chose sexier partners but less reliable providers; Pill-taking women did the opposite.

The convergent evidence across multiple measures—facial preferences, scent preferences, actual partner characteristics, relationship satisfaction—demonstrates the Pill alters mate selection.

Origins

The Pill emerged from deliberate effort by ideologically motivated funders. Margaret Sanger, founder of what became Planned Parenthood, spent decades seeking reliable oral contraception. In 1951, she recruited biologist Gregory Pincus to the project. Funding came primarily from Katharine McCormick, who eventually contributed millions.[26]

The movement’s motivations were mixed. Sanger and her allies were influenced by eugenics, then a mainstream progressive cause. Clarence Gamble, a Procter & Gamble heir who funded related research, explicitly aimed to reduce fertility among populations he considered undesirable.[27] Puerto Rico, where major testing occurred, had already seen extensive eugenics-influenced sterilization campaigns. By the 1950s, hospital-based sterilization had become normalized on the island.[28]

Puerto Rico was selected partly because birth control was legal there (since 1937), partly because of population density concerns, and partly—researchers’ correspondence suggests—because they expected greater compliance from poor women desperate for contraception than from American women who might refuse invasive testing protocols.[29]

Early trials revealed significant side effects. Of seventy women in one trial, fifty-six experienced nipple pigmentation changes, fifty-three had breast soreness, forty-four experienced nausea or vomiting. Only five reported no side effects.[30] Edris Rice-Wray, the physician supervising Puerto Rican trials, warned that the Pill produced “too many side reactions to be acceptable.”[31]

Pincus characterized the symptoms as “at worst inconvenient.”[32] The FDA approval process in 1960 focused on contraceptive efficacy and acute safety. No systematic investigation examined long-term psychological effects. No one asked what synthetic hormones might do to stress responses, mate preferences, or relationship formation over years of use.

Edward Tyler, who ran the Planned Parenthood clinic in Los Angeles and had extensive experience with the Pill, reported that over two-thirds of his patients quit due to side effects. He detected symptoms suggesting early menopause in some patients and worried about permanent changes.[33] He still supported approval, reasoning that side effects were preferable to unwanted pregnancy.

The questions that would reveal psychological effects were never asked. Sixty years later, they remain largely unfunded.

Research Gaps

Psychology and neuroscience have documented sex differences across cognition, emotion, and behavior for decades. Almost none of this research controls for hormonal contraception use.

This matters because research samples include substantial numbers of women on synthetic hormones. The Pill alters stress responses; studies measuring stress reactivity in mixed samples are measuring an average corresponding to no actual natural state. If the Pill affects personality expression—and the stress response data suggests it does—established norms for female personality are contaminated by pharmaceutical effects.

The 2018 Beltz study, often cited as evidence against Pill effects on personality, compared Pill users and non-users at a single time point.[34] This cross-sectional design cannot detect within-person changes. A woman whose personality shifted upon starting the Pill would appear identical to a naturally different woman in such a comparison.

Hill describes how researchers routinely excluded Pill users from stress studies to obtain clean data, treating the aberrant responses as methodological nuisance rather than a finding worth investigating.[7] How many studies have quietly removed these women? How many have published findings about “women” based predominantly on hormonally-altered subjects?

The studies that would definitively answer these questions—longitudinal tracking of women before and after initiating hormonal contraception, measuring personality, stress responses, relationship formation, and life outcomes over years—would be expensive and would produce inconvenient results. They have not been funded. The pharmaceutical industry has no incentive to discover that its products alter personality. Medical institutions prefer not to complicate contraceptive counseling. Advocacy organizations resist research that might be used to restrict access.

The result is a gap where knowledge should be—not an accidental gap, but a structurally maintained one. We have conducted a sixty-year experiment in population-scale hormonal intervention without tracking its psychological effects because powerful interests preferred not to know.

Sexual Economics

Sociologist Mark Regnerus documents downstream consequences in his analysis of contemporary mating markets.[35]

Before reliable contraception, sex and marriage were tightly linked through pregnancy risk. Women had incentives to require commitment before sex. Men who wanted sex had to offer commitment. Shotgun weddings were common—pregnancy sealed relationships that might otherwise have dissolved. The exchange was often unfair, frequently coercive, and constrained women’s choices. But it was structured in ways both parties understood.

The Pill severed this link. Sex could occur without pregnancy risk. The exchange relationship persisted—women still controlled sexual access, men still sought it—but terms changed. Women no longer needed marriage as pregnancy insurance. Men no longer needed to offer marriage to obtain sex.

Regnerus argues this created a split mating market: one sector oriented toward casual sex, another toward marriage, with ambiguous relationships occupying vast territory between. The split is invisible but real. Men and women can drift between sectors—pursuing casual encounters one week, seeking marriage the next. Many women participate in casual sex with varying degrees of hope that relationships will become serious. This hope often goes unrealized.

Women seeking commitment now compete not only with each other but with women willing to have sex without commitment. When some women accept less commitment for sex, the “price” that other women can demand falls. The Pill’s effects, Regnerus writes, “altered much about modern life and relationships, reducing women’s dependence on men’s resources while dropping the price of sexual access for men. It also split the mating market in two, laying bare men’s long-standing hopes for sex with fewer strings alongside women’s stable interests in stronger signals of commitment first.”[35]

The consequences accumulate across demographic data. Age at first marriage rose from the early twenties in 1960 to the late twenties today. The share of married young adults fell substantially—fewer than half of Americans in their twenties and early thirties are married now, compared with the vast majority in 1960. Cohabitation replaced marriage as the default committed relationship, but cohabiting relationships dissolve at higher rates than marriages. Many cohabitations are not oriented toward marriage at all; they are convenient arrangements that drift along without clear destination.

Women report that men seem unwilling to commit. Regnerus suggests a simpler explanation: men don’t need to commit to obtain what they want. They are not psychologically damaged or developmentally arrested. They simply face no pressure to offer what women seek in exchange for what men seek. “Men are not afraid to ‘man up’ and commit,” Regnerus writes. “They simply don’t need to.”[35]

The resulting dynamic pits women against each other in ways that feminist rhetoric about solidarity cannot address. Every woman willing to have sex without commitment makes it harder for other women to demand commitment. The “price” of sex is conveyed and socialized through culture. Women who try to demand more—who insist on courtship, commitment, investment before sex—find themselves competing against women who demand less.

The women most affected are those who most delayed marriage for education and careers—those who most thoroughly followed the feminist life script the Pill enabled. By their mid-thirties, the mating market has shifted against them. Men their age date younger women. Attractive, successful men have abundant options and little incentive to commit quickly. Age, prior relationships, and competing responsibilities make partnership harder to secure.

Meanwhile, the fear of divorce haunts the next generation. Young adults whose parents divorced are risk-averse about marriage. They demand exit options before committing. They hedge against failure rather than investing fully. Cohabitation seems safer than marriage precisely because it is easier to leave—but this very ease undermines the stability that makes long-term investment rational.

Regnerus concludes that “the contemporary mating system now openly wars against” stable marriage. The Pill created conditions for this conflict by severing the link between sex and commitment. Everything that followed—delayed marriage, rising cohabitation, epidemic loneliness—flows downstream from that chemical intervention.

Feedback Effects

The Pill did not cause feminist ideology, which existed for over a century before 1960. Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Suffragists organized throughout the nineteenth century. First-wave feminism achieved the vote. But feminist ideas about radically restructuring women’s lives—delaying marriage indefinitely, prioritizing career over family, treating motherhood as optional—remained marginal before the Pill.

Ideas require material conditions to spread. The feminist life script—delay marriage, invest in education, build a career, have children later if at all—was available before the Pill only to women willing to forgo sex entirely or lucky enough to avoid pregnancy despite sexual activity. Neither path was accessible to most women. The Pill made the feminist life script available to ordinary women with ordinary appetites for sex.

Beyond removing obstacles, the Pill reshaped psychology in ways that made feminist patterns feel natural rather than like sacrifices. Dampened stress responses make high-pressure career environments more tolerable—environments that naturally cycling women find more draining. Shifted mate preferences reduce the pull toward masculine men and traditional gender dynamics. Altered reward sensitivity—Pill users respond more to financial stimuli and less to attractive male faces—redirects motivation toward career achievement and away from mate-seeking.[36]

These psychological shifts create feedback loops at multiple levels.

At the individual level, women on the Pill find themselves better suited to feminist-structured institutions: competitive graduate programs, demanding career tracks, workplaces designed around continuous employment. They succeed in these environments and serve as models for younger women. Their success validates the feminist promise—see, women can do anything men do—without raising questions about whether the successful women are chemically different from their grandmothers or from women who struggle in the same environments.

At the institutional level, normalized feminist behavior creates structures that assume women will follow the feminist script. Universities expect continuous enrollment. Employers expect uninterrupted career trajectories. Professional tracks are designed for people without caregiving interruptions. These structures reward patterns compatible with Pill use and penalize traditional paths. The woman who takes years off to raise children falls behind in hierarchies designed for continuous investment. The woman who prioritizes family formation over career advancement watches her peers advance past her.

At the cultural level, the Pill enabled the sexual revolution, transforming norms around sex, marriage, and family. The old norms—which constrained both male and female behavior—dissolved. New norms emerged celebrating sexual freedom, delayed commitment, and individual self-actualization over family obligation. Women who internalized these new norms took the Pill. The Pill shaped them into women who fit the norms. The feedback loop tightened with each generation.

Women who followed traditional paths became increasingly marginal. They didn’t fit institutions designed for career-focused women. They didn’t share preferences shaped by hormonal contraception. They experienced themselves as swimming against a current that everyone else navigated easily. Many wondered what was wrong with them for wanting what their grandmothers wanted—marriage, children, home-centered life. Cultural messaging told them such desires reflected false consciousness, patriarchal conditioning, failure to achieve authentic selfhood. The Pill made that messaging persuasive by making feminist desires feel genuinely natural to the medicated majority.

Consider a thought experiment. Suppose a drug existed that, when taken by men, made them more interested in caregiving, more attracted to high-powered women, and less interested in casual sex. Suppose this drug became nearly universal among young men—82 percent usage—and its effects saturated the cultural environment in which expectations about masculinity were formed. Would we conclude that men had finally achieved authentic expression of their true nature, freed from patriarchal conditioning? Or would we recognize that we had chemically altered male psychology to produce the behavior we wanted?

The parallel is imperfect but instructive. The question is whether the psychological changes the Pill produces have shaped what we take to be natural female preferences and aspirations. What looks like women choosing feminism substantially involves the Pill making feminist choices feel obvious while traditional choices feel strange, costly, or even shameful.

The women who struggled most under this regime were those least affected by the Pill’s psychological effects—women for whom the drug did not successfully suppress what might be called natural or innate preferences. These women found the feminist life script genuinely unnatural, genuinely costly, genuinely at odds with their desires. They were told their dissatisfaction reflected personal failure or residual patriarchal damage. The possibility that their hormones weren’t being altered the “right” way did not occur to anyone.

Implications

The happiness paradox has a chemical component. The Pill enabled women to live feminist lives by altering their psychology in ways that produce chronic stress markers, suboptimal mate selection, and dampened emotional responsiveness. The decline in reported happiness follows.

Women chose partners while hormonally altered, then found themselves mismatched when their chemistry changed—whether from stopping the Pill or from changes in its effects over time. They pursued careers in states of suppressed stress response, then wondered why achievement felt hollow once the dampening lifted or its costs accumulated. They followed life scripts that felt natural to their medicated selves, then discovered their unmedicated selves wanted something different.

We cannot know what women would have chosen absent population-scale hormonal intervention. When 82 percent have used the Pill, when research samples are saturated with users, when cultural norms were established by medicated populations, no uncontaminated reference point exists. The baseline against which we might compare is gone—contaminated before most researchers thought to look.

The psychological effects documented in the research—stress response disruption, mate preference shifts, relationship satisfaction differences—are substantial. Women deserve to know what the evidence shows. Physicians should discuss these findings during contraceptive counseling. Researchers should receive funding to conduct the longitudinal studies that would map the full extent of what the Pill does to female psychology.

The Pill made modern feminism livable by making feminist life patterns feel natural to women whose hormones were pharmaceutically altered. It also contributed to declining happiness by disrupting systems that generate satisfaction and meaning.

We have conducted a sixty-year experiment in population-scale hormonal intervention without tracking its psychological consequences. The studies that would establish the full scope of these effects remain unfunded. The questions remain unasked. The women taking the Pill remain uninformed about the research that exists.

This is not an accident. It is a choice—made by institutions that profit from the Pill, depend on the Pill, or have built their worldview on the Pill’s consequences. The informational gap will not close on its own.

References

[1] Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2009). The paradox of declining female happiness. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 1(2), 190-225.

[2] Turvey, C. (2015). Women more likely than men to initiate divorces, but not non-marital breakups. American Sociological Association press release.

[3] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office on Women’s Health. (2021). Mental health conditions.

[4] Grant, B. F., et al. (2017). Prevalence of 12-month alcohol use, high-risk drinking, and DSM-IV alcohol use disorder in the United States, 2001-2002 to 2012-2013. JAMA Psychiatry, 74(9), 911-923.

[5] Curtin, S. C. (2020). State suicide rates among adolescents and young adults aged 10-24: United States, 2000-2018. National Vital Statistics Reports, 69(11).

[6] Daniels, K., & Abdo, M. (2022). Current contraceptive status among women aged 15-49: United States, 2017-2019. NCHS Data Brief No. 388.

[7] Hill, S. E. (2019). This is your brain on birth control. Avery.

[8] Kirschbaum, C., et al. (1999). Impact of gender, menstrual cycle phase, and oral contraceptives on the activity of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. Psychosomatic Medicine, 61(2), 154-162.

[9] Kirschbaum, C., et al. (1996). Adrenocortical activation following stressful exercise: Further evidence for attenuated free cortisol responses in women using oral contraceptives. Stress Medicine, 12(3), 137-143.

[10] Roche, D. J., et al. (2013). Hormonal contraceptive use diminishes salivary cortisol response to psychosocial stress and naltrexone in healthy women. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, 109, 84-90.

[11] Bouma, E. M., et al. (2009). Adolescents’ cortisol responses to awakening and social stress: Effects of gender, menstrual phase and oral contraceptives. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 34(6), 884-893.

[12] Meulenberg, P., & Hofman, J. (1990). The effect of oral contraceptive use and pregnancy on the daily rhythm of cortisol and cortisone. Clinica Chimica Acta, 190(3), 211-221.

[13] Gaffey, A. E., et al. (2014). Circulating cortisol levels after exogenous cortisol administration are higher in women using hormonal contraceptives. Stress, 17(4), 314-320.

[14] Hertel, J., et al. (2017). Evidence for stress-like alterations in the HPA-axis in women taking oral contraceptives. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 14111.

[15] Conrad, C. D. (2008). Chronic stress-induced hippocampal vulnerability: The glucocorticoid vulnerability hypothesis. Reviews in the Neurosciences, 19(6), 395-411.

[16] Penton-Voak, I. S., et al. (1999). Menstrual cycle alters face preference. Nature, 399, 741-742.

[17] Gangestad, S. W., et al. (2004). Women’s preferences for male behavioral displays change across the menstrual cycle. Psychological Science, 15(3), 203-207.

[18] Jones, B. C., et al. (2005). Commitment to relationships and preferences for femininity and apparent health in faces are strongest on days of the menstrual cycle when progesterone level is high. Hormones and Behavior, 48(3), 283-290.

[19] Alvergne, A., & Lummaa, V. (2010). Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 25(3), 171-179.

[20] Welling, L. L. M. (2013). Psychobehavioral effects of hormonal contraceptive use. Evolutionary Psychology, 11(3), 718-742.

[21] Little, A. C., et al. (2013). Oral contraceptive use in women changes preferences for male facial masculinity and is associated with partner facial masculinity. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 38(9), 1777-1785.

[22] Wedekind, C., et al. (1995). MHC-dependent mate preferences in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 260(1359), 245-249.

[23] Roberts, S. C., et al. (2008). MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 275(1652), 2715-2722.

[24] Garver-Apgar, C. E., et al. (2006). Major histocompatibility complex alleles, sexual responsivity, and unfaithfulness in romantic couples. Psychological Science, 17(10), 830-835.

[25] Roberts, S. C., et al. (2012). Relationship satisfaction and outcome in women who meet their partner while using oral contraception. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 279(1732), 1430-1436.

[26] Eig, J. (2014). The birth of the pill: How four crusaders reinvented sex and launched a revolution. W. W. Norton.

[27] Stern, A. M. (2005). Eugenic nation: Faults and frontiers of better breeding in modern America. University of California Press.

[28] Ramirez de Arellano, A. B., & Seipp, C. (1983). Colonialism, Catholicism, and contraception: A history of birth control in Puerto Rico. University of North Carolina Press.

[29] Briggs, L. (2002). Reproducing empire: Race, sex, science, and U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico. University of California Press.

[30] Pincus, G. (1954). Pseudopregnancy data memo. Gregory Pincus Papers, Library of Congress.

[31] Marks, L. V. (2001). Sexual chemistry: A history of the contraceptive pill. Yale University Press.

[32] Pincus, G. (1954). Memo, November 1. John Rock Papers, Countway Library of Medicine.

[33] Tyler, E. T. (1960). Oral contraception. JAMA, 173(1), 63-64.

[34] Beltz, A. M., et al. (2018). The general factor of personality and Big Five trait differences in adult women’s hormonal contraceptive use. Personality and Individual Differences, 129, 67-71.

[35] Regnerus, M. (2017). Cheap sex: The transformation of men, marriage, and monogamy. Oxford University Press.

[36] Bonenberger, M., et al. (2013). It’s all about money: Oral contraceptive use modifies neural responses to monetary rewards. NeuroReport, 24(17), 951-955.

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