By the age of 37, my (Protestant) paternal grandmother had borne 13 children — rather more than she'd intended. My maternal grandmother had only four children, but she sometimes said that she wouldn't have had any had the pill had been available in her day. In the last 50 years, the freedom for a woman to control her own fertility, to have children only by choice, has changed women's lives dramatically.
The Pill: The Liberation of Women tells the story of how the contraceptive pill came to exist despite strong conservative opposition, in a social context where sex before marriage meant risking a conspicuous pregnancy (far more scandalous than today's young adults can believe), and there was wide disapproval of the idea of contraception even within marriage.

Even in the early 1950s, women still did not have a simple, foolproof method of birth control. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, the use of contraception was a crime. One of the many valuable 'talking heads' in this documentary is a doctor who explains that they performed hysterectomies instead. "Our poor patients suffered enormously," he says. "The risks of what we were doing were simply not rational."

Today, we think of the pill as a product of the pharmaceutical industry, omitting the role of two amazing old ladies, Margaret Sanger and Katharine Dexter McCormick. The documentary returns them to their rightful position. Sanger was an outspoken birth control advocate who, from the early 1900s had challenged the Comstock laws — U.S. statutes that criminalised the sale of contraceptive devices and the dissemination of birth control information through the mail.

When Sanger was in her seventies, she commissioned the brilliant reproductive physiologist, Gregory Pincus, to create a simple pill that women could take to prevent conception. Pincus enlisted Harvard obstetrician and gynaecologist John Rock to lead the clinical studies of the pill's effects. Katharine McCormick, a rich widow committed to birth control, funded the research.

The early pill had a dosage level about ten times higher than modern varieties, and had very serious side-effects in some women, including strokes. Despite this, and condemnation by the Catholic Church, it went on to change the world.