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Dr. Rock’s Taxonomy · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's nineteen sixty four. NBC News Inchorman David Brinkley
0:23
Speaker 1: has come to Boston to meet John Rock.
0:26
Speaker 2: Doctor Rock, who is seventy three years old, lives and
0:29
Speaker 2: works in Brookline, Massachusetts. Mainly he works at his clinic
0:33
Speaker 2: or center, devoted to the study of human reproduction and
0:37
Speaker 2: the treatment of problems in an area where, when you
0:40
Speaker 2: get down to it, remarkably little is known.
0:43
Speaker 1: John Rock the most famous physician in the United States,
0:47
Speaker 1: co inventor of one of the most important drugs in
0:50
Speaker 1: human history, the birth control pill.
0:53
Speaker 2: He went to the High School of Commerce in Boston,
0:55
Speaker 2: to Harvard, to Harvard Medical School, interned at Massachusetts General Hospital,
1:02
Speaker 2: directed for thirty years of fertility clinic at the Free
1:05
Speaker 2: Hospital for Women, and now goes to Mass every day
1:08
Speaker 2: at brook Plans Saint Mary's Church.
1:16
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
1:20
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked or Misunderstood. This is the
1:30
Speaker 1: second of three episodes on how to Think Like a Jesuit.
1:35
Speaker 1: This one is about John Rock's Great Dilemma, a man
1:39
Speaker 1: who went to Mass every day at Saint Mary's Catholic
1:42
Speaker 1: Church and then helped create the pill, something his church
1:46
Speaker 1: could not accept.
1:54
Speaker 3: One of the events that would shape my later life
1:57
Speaker 3: to a great degree was an experience I had with
2:00
Speaker 3: the cynic who was a cured in Marlborough.
2:03
Speaker 1: Rock is tall, distinguished, looks like Carry Grant. His interview
2:08
Speaker 1: with Brinkley was over how a century ago, so forgive
2:11
Speaker 1: the quality of the tape.
2:13
Speaker 3: I was just about fourteen and then walking out of
2:16
Speaker 3: Mass one Sunday when Father Finnick beckoned me and asked
2:20
Speaker 3: me if I would like to drive down with him
2:22
Speaker 3: to visit old Folks home old children called the Profile.
2:27
Speaker 3: Father Finnick was a quiet and unobtrusive man. When he
2:31
Speaker 3: was holding forth at first Communion class or Confirmation class,
2:35
Speaker 3: he put across what he intended us to learn with
2:38
Speaker 3: clarity and vigor, so that much of it has remained
2:41
Speaker 3: with me all my life.
2:43
Speaker 1: At this point, NBC shows b roll of a horse
2:46
Speaker 1: and carriage, something Rock would have ridden in his youth,
2:49
Speaker 1: and if added sound effects, God bless them.
2:52
Speaker 3: We had never been more than just friendly, but somehow
2:56
Speaker 3: I remember quite distinctly that ride. He was sounding off saying, John,
3:02
Speaker 3: always stick to your own conscience. Let no one ever
3:06
Speaker 3: keep it for you.
3:09
Speaker 1: It's clear as Rock tells that story that it has
3:12
Speaker 1: stayed with him his whole life.
3:14
Speaker 3: And just as I was beginning to get that, and
3:17
Speaker 3: then there was a moment's pause, and then he said,
3:21
Speaker 3: and when I say no one, I mean no one.
3:26
Speaker 3: I've never forgotten those words.
3:30
Speaker 1: So I just want to talk about him because I
3:33
Speaker 1: find him, as I'm sure you do, to be such
3:36
Speaker 1: a fascinating figure, extraordinary.
3:38
Speaker 4: Figure, really complicated. Really, I don't feel like I ever
3:43
Speaker 4: really understood him all those years in those papers. I
3:48
Speaker 4: feel like I understood him partly, but I don't feel
3:51
Speaker 4: like I ever completely understood him.
3:54
Speaker 1: I went to Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia to talk to
3:57
Speaker 1: the two people who probably know more about John Rock
4:00
Speaker 1: than anyone else, Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, who wrote
4:04
Speaker 1: a book called The Fertility Doctor. It's the definitive account
4:08
Speaker 1: of Rock. You go first.
4:10
Speaker 4: I'm Margaret Marsh and I'm a university professor. That's a title,
4:15
Speaker 4: university professor at Records University.
4:18
Speaker 2: Yeah.
4:19
Speaker 5: I'm Wanda Runner and I'm a gynecologist. I work for
4:23
Speaker 5: penn Medicine. I'm a professor of Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology,
4:29
Speaker 5: and I work at Pennsylvania Hospital and your sisters.
4:34
Speaker 1: Where did you guys grow up around here? Is that
4:36
Speaker 1: why you're in this We grew up.
4:37
Speaker 4: In Vineland, New Jersey. We grew up with our father's family,
4:43
Speaker 4: Italian Americans. We're the granddaughters of immigrants, and a lot
4:48
Speaker 4: of our family is still there in Vineland.
4:50
Speaker 1: Oh so, so, I'm assuming your Catholic or were many
4:55
Speaker 1: years ago, many years ago, I see, But this is
4:57
Speaker 1: not foreign territory for you, not at all to be
4:59
Speaker 1: talking about Catholics. Everyone in this episode is Catholic except
5:04
Speaker 1: for me. I'm a wannabe.
5:06
Speaker 6: Well. We always have this joke when people ask guess
5:09
Speaker 6: how we work so well together, and we always say
5:12
Speaker 6: I always say I'm the oldest sister, so I get
5:15
Speaker 6: to be the boss, and she says, I'm the younger sister,
5:18
Speaker 6: so I always get my way, Which it's true.
5:22
Speaker 5: It's true.
5:23
Speaker 1: The two of them spent years on John Rock, tracking
5:26
Speaker 1: down relatives and colleagues, slowly working their way through his papers.
5:31
Speaker 1: Rock's daughter told them that he had been undecided about
5:34
Speaker 1: what kind of medicine to practice, but then in the
5:37
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds he had a rotation as a medical
5:40
Speaker 1: student delivering babies in the Irish tenements of Boston. He
5:44
Speaker 1: saw a wretched poverty, young women overwhelmed with five or
5:48
Speaker 1: six or seven children families. They could barely feed her clothes.
5:53
Speaker 4: The overwhelming sorrow he felt for the women and their
6:00
Speaker 4: difficult situations was what decided him to go into obstetrics
6:04
Speaker 4: and gynecology.
6:06
Speaker 1: Rock founded the Fertility and Endocrine Clinic at the Free
6:09
Speaker 1: Hospital for Women in Brookline, where he served the Irish
6:12
Speaker 1: poor of Boston through the difficult years of the Depression
6:15
Speaker 1: and the Second World War. He was never terribly interested
6:19
Speaker 1: in charging for his services.
6:21
Speaker 5: I think, and you know, okay, I love the man. Now,
6:25
Speaker 5: what can I say?
6:26
Speaker 7: I think of him as an unusual figure in medicine,
6:31
Speaker 7: But you know, he had that gift of being able to.
6:35
Speaker 5: Communicate with women from all different classes.
6:39
Speaker 1: One of Rock's friends was a researcher pen named Luigi Mastroianni,
6:42
Speaker 1: who was still alive when the sisters were doing their work.
6:45
Speaker 4: It was Luigi who said he would come out. This
6:49
Speaker 4: was whether it was a clinic patient or a private patient.
6:52
Speaker 4: He'd come out. He'd greet the patient, he'd walk her
6:55
Speaker 4: back in, sit her down, talk to her.
6:59
Speaker 5: And always direct, you know, not he would always have
7:03
Speaker 5: a direct conversation with the patient, you know, like directly
7:06
Speaker 5: look at them.
7:09
Speaker 1: Not to push the Catholic thing too far, but it's
7:12
Speaker 1: very He has a touch of the parish priest in him, a.
7:15
Speaker 5: Touch, a touch that's really good. That did you grow
7:19
Speaker 5: up Catholic too?
7:21
Speaker 1: Like I said, I want to be Catholic, not the
7:23
Speaker 1: real thing.
7:24
Speaker 5: I think that's very I think that is.
7:29
Speaker 1: Good.
7:29
Speaker 5: Doctors always have a touch of the parish priest, or
7:32
Speaker 5: the minister, or the rabbi or because if you don't,
7:37
Speaker 5: you're less effective.
7:39
Speaker 4: And not to brag about my sister, but she does
7:41
Speaker 4: have the second highest patient satisfactory.
7:48
Speaker 5: That's all I all have. It's mandatory.
7:53
Speaker 8: She's very she's very good.
7:54
Speaker 9: Love.
7:55
Speaker 4: She's one of the most beloved parish.
7:59
Speaker 3: She's one of the most love.
8:00
Speaker 1: Your sister is allowed to boast about you. I don't
8:02
Speaker 1: know why you're why you're trying to stop her?
8:04
Speaker 3: Wait?
8:05
Speaker 1: Where were we got involved with birth control? Almost by accident.
8:12
Speaker 1: He was more interested in treating infertility, and in the
8:15
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties he started working with two hormones that had
8:19
Speaker 1: only just been isolated, estrogen and progesterone. What's his theory
8:25
Speaker 1: that progesterone and estrin might be useful in combating infertility?
8:31
Speaker 5: Okay, okay, I'll tell you.
8:33
Speaker 7: My conjecture was that, I think it came out of
8:35
Speaker 7: looking at the endometrium, you know, to seeing that some
8:39
Speaker 7: women did not have the secretory changes that would have
8:43
Speaker 7: been anticipated after ovulation.
8:46
Speaker 10: I think that makes sense because the way he would
8:49
Speaker 10: explain it, yes, was he said some women seemed to
8:55
Speaker 10: have underdeveloped.
8:58
Speaker 4: Systems.
8:59
Speaker 5: He said systems he used.
9:01
Speaker 10: Underdeveloped oh yes, reproductive systems. And he thought that this
9:07
Speaker 10: underdevelopment was due to a problem with the hormones. And
9:14
Speaker 10: this was all observation. Remember, they didn't know anything. I mean,
9:18
Speaker 10: they didn't you know, they didn't know the kinds of
9:20
Speaker 10: things we know now, So it's all observationalized. And he
9:22
Speaker 10: would say, some of them get pregnant on their own,
9:26
Speaker 10: and then after they get pregnant, once on their own,
9:29
Speaker 10: their systems quote seemed to be developed.
9:31
Speaker 1: In the analogy of a car with a dead battery, Yeah,
9:35
Speaker 1: jumpstart the battery, and then after that the battery works.
9:37
Speaker 4: Yes, sort of what he's thinking, sort of, yes, yes.
9:41
Speaker 1: So that's how Rock got interested in the role of
9:43
Speaker 1: hormones in reproduction. Meanwhile, fifty miles away in Worcester, a
9:47
Speaker 1: scientist named Gregory Pinkus was working on the same idea,
9:51
Speaker 1: only he thought that estrogen and progesterone might actually work
9:54
Speaker 1: to prevent pregnancy. Pincus and Rock started doing research together,
9:59
Speaker 1: which is how the birth control pill came about. Pincus
10:04
Speaker 1: was the hard scientist. Rock ran the clinical trials. They
10:08
Speaker 1: took their data to the Food and Drug Administration in
10:10
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, asking it to approve the pill as
10:13
Speaker 1: a prescription drug. The FDA dragged its feet, so Rock
10:17
Speaker 1: paid a personal visit. As he told David Brinkley in
10:20
Speaker 1: the NBC profile.
10:22
Speaker 11: When we went down, we hadn't a point where with
10:24
Speaker 11: the director of FDA or something like that, because all
10:29
Speaker 11: the material had been sent to Washington and no response.
10:34
Speaker 1: Tall distinguished John Rock, the Catholic Kerry Grant, the most
10:37
Speaker 1: famous doctor in America, knocked on the man's door.
10:41
Speaker 11: Yeah, all material, the right stack of stuff was just
10:45
Speaker 11: and he hadn't even looked at it. So we talked
10:48
Speaker 11: about it, and he said, well he would go sow
10:51
Speaker 11: it as soon as he could. And I went over
10:53
Speaker 11: and then you have no time.
10:56
Speaker 3: You'll do it now, and they said all right, and
11:01
Speaker 3: so he signed to watch the call it.
11:03
Speaker 4: That was it.
11:04
Speaker 1: One of the two or three most important drugs of
11:07
Speaker 1: the twentieth century was approved because as one of the
11:09
Speaker 1: drugs inventors took the train to Washington, marched into the
11:13
Speaker 1: FDA and said, you'll do it now.
11:16
Speaker 11: That I probably the government in taking the final step,
11:24
Speaker 11: but we knew it was all right. I mean, I
11:27
Speaker 11: was convinced, but my conscience was clear about that.
11:31
Speaker 1: How much do you love John Rock? But now John
11:35
Speaker 1: Rock has a problem. He's helped create the world's greatest contraceptive,
11:41
Speaker 1: and yet he's a devout Roman Catholic and his church
11:44
Speaker 1: doesn't believe in contraception. Consider The Costy canoeby People Encyclical
11:50
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty. In it, Pope Pious the eleventh declared
11:54
Speaker 1: that and a quote, any use whatsoever of matrimony exercise
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Speaker 1: in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated
12:02
Speaker 1: in its natural power to generate life is an offense
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Speaker 1: against the law of God and of nature, and those
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Speaker 1: who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of
12:12
Speaker 1: a grave sin. The act is deliberately frustrated in its
12:17
Speaker 1: natural power to generate life. That's what a contraceptive does.
12:22
Speaker 1: And what is John Rock's birth control pill. It is
12:25
Speaker 1: a pill that deliberately frustrates the natural power to generate life.
12:39
Speaker 1: Let's run through John Rock's options. He could renounce his
12:43
Speaker 1: work on the pill and accept the teaching of the church.
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Speaker 1: Only he's not going to do that, is he He
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Speaker 1: remembers what his priest told him when he was a boy,
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Speaker 1: John always stick to your own conscience. Let no one
12:55
Speaker 1: ever keep it for you. Margaret Marsha and Wander ron
12:58
Speaker 1: Or tell the story in their book of when Rock
13:01
Speaker 1: was nineteen and he got a job with the United
13:03
Speaker 1: Fruit Company in Guatemala. He was responsible for a group
13:07
Speaker 1: of Jamaican migrant workers and United Fruit decided to cut
13:10
Speaker 1: everyone's wages. And who did Rock support his workers?
13:15
Speaker 4: He just defied all the bosses that United Fruit and
13:18
Speaker 4: he said, they don't need a wage cut. There's no
13:22
Speaker 4: reason for a wagecot. I'm not cutting the wages on
13:24
Speaker 4: my farm. Kind of thinny. Of course, they cut the
13:28
Speaker 4: wages on his farm. Then there's this huge strike and
13:31
Speaker 4: he says, well, he rights to the president of the company,
13:35
Speaker 4: say this is ridiculous. If you were here, you would
13:38
Speaker 4: know that this is wrong. They don't need a wage cut.
13:41
Speaker 4: And then there's the strike and one of the Jamaican
13:45
Speaker 4: workers is very gravely injured and two of the others aren't.
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Speaker 4: He's like nineteen years old. He wades into this wildcat strike,
13:55
Speaker 4: gets the injured men, brings them to the hospital. And
14:01
Speaker 4: you wonder, where does a nineteen year old who's probably
14:06
Speaker 4: never had a deep thought about racial injustice in his life,
14:11
Speaker 4: where does he get that reservoir?
14:15
Speaker 1: John Rock always kept his own conscience. Many years later,
14:19
Speaker 1: in his dilemma over the church and the birth control pill,
14:22
Speaker 1: he had another option. Of course, he could leave the church.
14:26
Speaker 1: Lots of people have left the Catholic Church over disagreements
14:29
Speaker 1: with its teachings. But Rock can't leave the Catholic Church.
14:32
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me?
14:34
Speaker 4: Leaving Catholicism would have I don't think he would have
14:38
Speaker 4: ever thought of it.
14:39
Speaker 1: Well, I noticed there was a little line that you
14:42
Speaker 1: quoted from my I think one of his diaries about
14:45
Speaker 1: a day where he said he attended Mass in three
14:47
Speaker 1: different churches in one day. Yeah, yeah, so that gives
14:51
Speaker 1: you a flavor of I suppose.
14:53
Speaker 4: The culture his mother was to vow. His mother was
14:56
Speaker 4: very different about Yeah. One of my colleagues, who's a
15:00
Speaker 4: James Joyce scholar, told me about a line in one
15:04
Speaker 4: of James Joyce's book where the hero and his friend
15:08
Speaker 4: are walking around. Then one of them is saying to
15:11
Speaker 4: the other one, I've lost my faith. Man, I've lost
15:14
Speaker 4: my faith. And so the other one says, are you
15:17
Speaker 4: going to become a Protestant? And he says, I lost
15:21
Speaker 4: my faith? Man, I didn't tell you I lost my mind.
15:26
Speaker 1: And that's very John Rock. So he's not going to
15:28
Speaker 1: put his head down and go along. And he's not
15:31
Speaker 1: going to abandon the church. That leaves only one option.
15:35
Speaker 1: He's going to stay and try to convince the church
15:37
Speaker 1: to change its mind. Now, how do you do that
15:40
Speaker 1: if you're a devout Catholic in the nineteen sixties. The
15:43
Speaker 1: answer is you think like a Jesuit. Let's leave John
15:49
Speaker 1: Rock for a moment and let me run a thought
15:51
Speaker 1: experiment by you. It comes out of a conversation I
15:55
Speaker 1: had with a scientist named Kurt Barnhardt. He's a professor
15:59
Speaker 1: at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia, an
16:03
Speaker 1: obgyn who does research in reproductive biology. Barnhardt's kind of
16:08
Speaker 1: a modern day version of John Rock, only now we
16:11
Speaker 1: know a lot more about female reproduction than we did
16:13
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties.
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Speaker 12: I mean to insult you with a student level lecture,
16:17
Speaker 12: but you know progesterone is pulling the plug out from
16:20
Speaker 12: the street to turn the lights off in your house.
16:22
Speaker 12: It's not turning the lamp off on your bedstands.
16:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're still dropped, in other words, in a relatively
16:28
Speaker 1: crude conceptual model about how to prevent.
16:31
Speaker 12: Yeah, right, right, And it would be better if you
16:34
Speaker 12: could prevent ovulation. I mean the home run I'll share
16:37
Speaker 12: the Nobel Prize with you would be there's an attrisia
16:40
Speaker 12: of eggs with women's aging. If I could stop women's
16:44
Speaker 12: eggs from growing and not losing them, not only would
16:46
Speaker 12: I prevent I would allow you to get pregnant when
16:48
Speaker 12: you want. I would remove the biological clock and you
16:51
Speaker 12: could get pregnant at sixty right.
16:54
Speaker 1: So you mean you could decouple the aging of a
16:57
Speaker 1: woman's eggs from the regular aging process.
17:00
Speaker 9: Is that?
17:00
Speaker 11: What is that?
17:00
Speaker 12: Theoretically? I mean, lucularly, if woman is born with all
17:03
Speaker 12: the eggs that she ever makes and they're all sitting
17:05
Speaker 12: in the ovary, and what's really neat is and we
17:07
Speaker 12: don't understand this. But in one month, a group of
17:10
Speaker 12: eggs starts growing and competing. That's the one that ovulates,
17:13
Speaker 12: and all the other ones die off. When you run
17:15
Speaker 12: out of groups, you run out of menopause. But we
17:18
Speaker 12: don't understand what tells the group to grow. So if
17:23
Speaker 12: we could say, don't grow your follicle this month, throw
17:26
Speaker 12: it next.
17:27
Speaker 1: Month, putting it on pause. Right, a woman is born
17:31
Speaker 1: with a fixed number of eggs, you don't make any
17:34
Speaker 1: new ones. By puberty, you might have three hundred to
17:37
Speaker 1: four hundred thousand eggs, and every month, like clockwork, you
17:40
Speaker 1: lose about a thousand of them. That's the iron logic
17:43
Speaker 1: of female fertility. But Barnhardt says, we might have found
17:47
Speaker 1: a drug that would allow a woman to stop the clock,
17:50
Speaker 1: to hit pause. It's being developed by several of his colleagues,
17:54
Speaker 1: Kara Goldman at Northwestern among them. It's called m tour.
17:58
Speaker 1: Now understand that this approach, under the best of circumstances,
18:03
Speaker 1: is years and years away from ever becoming available. That's
18:06
Speaker 1: why this is a thought experiment. So here's the question.
18:10
Speaker 1: Is mTOR a contraceptive.
18:13
Speaker 12: I wouldn't pitch it as contraception. I wouldn't I would.
18:17
Speaker 12: I would pitch it as delay, you know words. It's
18:21
Speaker 12: not like I'm trying to not get pregnant today by
18:25
Speaker 12: need a contraceptive, right, I mean no, let's gout. Wow,
18:30
Speaker 12: this is interesting, right.
18:32
Speaker 1: Because I'm thinking you're, you know, up against the exact
18:35
Speaker 1: same dilemma John Rock was up against, which is you know,
18:39
Speaker 1: could you, for example, could you with the How would
18:42
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church view such a measure? They're they're opposed
18:45
Speaker 1: to artificial contraception, but what if this is not? Is
18:47
Speaker 1: this plausibly not contraception?
18:52
Speaker 12: Yeah? I'm Catholic, and I struggle with us all the time.
18:55
Speaker 1: Like I said, everyone in this story is Catholic. On
18:59
Speaker 1: the one hand, Barnhardt says, m tour is obviously something
19:02
Speaker 1: that allows a woman to have sex without the possibility
19:05
Speaker 1: of getting pregnant. You take a pill and you know,
19:09
Speaker 1: longer ovulate. As the Pope wrote in nineteen thirty, those
19:12
Speaker 1: who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of
19:16
Speaker 1: a grave sin. How is the Pope going to agree
19:19
Speaker 1: with mTOR?
19:20
Speaker 12: But on the other hand, well, you could say that
19:23
Speaker 12: this is a way of controlling your aging or postponing
19:27
Speaker 12: or prophylaxing or being sure. But I'm open to having
19:30
Speaker 12: a family, and I'm open to life, and I'm open later,
19:33
Speaker 12: just not right now. So that may be a plausible.
19:36
Speaker 1: Argument if you look at it that way. M tour
19:39
Speaker 1: is actually not a means to suppress your fertility, but
19:42
Speaker 1: a means to extend your fertility. How is the pope
19:46
Speaker 1: going to have a problem with a mechanism that allows
19:48
Speaker 1: women to have more children later in life. If this
19:53
Speaker 1: way of thinking sounds familiar, it should. Barnhard is doing
19:57
Speaker 1: a nice little bit of casuistry here, the kind of
19:59
Speaker 1: thinking we described in the previous episode. Casuistry, remember, begins
20:04
Speaker 1: with the descent into the particular. What exactly am I
20:08
Speaker 1: dealing with? Well, a drug that effectively freezes your eggs
20:12
Speaker 1: inside your own body. Then casuistry involves an exercise in taxonomy.
20:18
Speaker 1: Where does this new case fit in relation to existing cases?
20:23
Speaker 1: And Barnhart's point is that emptor is often the corner
20:26
Speaker 1: with fertility drugs, not over here with the traditional contraceptives.
20:31
Speaker 1: Barnhart said that the first thing his group is going
20:33
Speaker 1: to try and do is a study with women who
20:35
Speaker 1: are undergoing chemotherapy, because chemotherapy in many cases destroys a
20:40
Speaker 1: woman's eggs, not all of them.
20:43
Speaker 12: In some cases.
20:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, are you serious?
20:44
Speaker 12: Chemotherapy is designed to kill dividing cells, and by definition, right,
20:49
Speaker 12: that's what it's killing. And it also kills many other
20:53
Speaker 12: slowly dividing cells. That's why you get gie upset and
20:55
Speaker 12: you lose your hair. But it also kills women's eggs.
20:58
Speaker 12: So one of the consequences cur could stop, could stop
21:03
Speaker 12: the development of the eggs such that they're no longer
21:06
Speaker 12: receptive to the chemotherapy.
21:08
Speaker 1: By hitting pause on the whole thing. Right, Oh see,
21:11
Speaker 1: that's what a clever Oh, so pitch that way. You're
21:14
Speaker 1: not even talking. You're talking about this is an agent
21:17
Speaker 1: of the preservation of fertility right now. Notice what Barnard
21:24
Speaker 1: is doing here. He's not saying the church's position on
21:28
Speaker 1: contraception is crazy and needs to be changed. He's saying,
21:32
Speaker 1: this new thing that we've come up with may actually
21:35
Speaker 1: be consistent with the church's teaching. Isn't the church interested
21:39
Speaker 1: in creating life? Well, mTOR is very much in that spirit.
21:43
Speaker 1: Look at its potential for creating life. Is this hair splitting.
21:48
Speaker 1: Casuistry is sometimes criticized on just those grounds that it's
21:52
Speaker 1: a way for smart people to rationalize doing whatever they want.
21:55
Speaker 1: That's why the term jesuitical has a slightly derogatory connotation.
22:00
Speaker 1: But that's not what's happening here. This isn't cynical rationalization.
22:05
Speaker 1: Right now, the Catholic teaching on contraception makes it harder
22:09
Speaker 1: from millions of women in developing countries to get access
22:12
Speaker 1: to birth control, despite the fact that controlling fertility is
22:16
Speaker 1: one of the easiest ways to lift families out of poverty.
22:20
Speaker 1: We can wait for the pope one day to change
22:23
Speaker 1: his mind, or we can come up with a contraceptive
22:26
Speaker 1: that is different enough from traditional contraceptives that it no
22:29
Speaker 1: longer has to be called a contraceptive. The rules of
22:34
Speaker 1: how to behave ethically in the modern world do not
22:37
Speaker 1: come down from the heavens on stone tablets. They are
22:41
Speaker 1: things that have to be negotiated. Casuistry is a method
22:45
Speaker 1: of doing that negotiation. You see, you're a Catholic.
22:49
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, And I struggle with that. Do I know
22:55
Speaker 12: more scientifically in the popes too? Sure? Does that allow
22:59
Speaker 12: me to allow get different interpretations? I don't know.
23:04
Speaker 1: You are in a line of research that if the
23:07
Speaker 1: Pope were here, sitting in his chair, he would disagree
23:10
Speaker 1: with what you do for a living.
23:13
Speaker 12: I would hope not, but he probably would.
23:15
Speaker 1: I guess just that idea that the Pope would disapprove
23:21
Speaker 1: seemed to pain him. And that's exactly how John Rock
23:25
Speaker 1: must have felt half a century ago. He helped to
23:28
Speaker 1: invent a method of birth control, and he worried that
23:31
Speaker 1: the Pope might sit down next to him one day
23:33
Speaker 1: and disapprove of his life's work. So he decided to
23:37
Speaker 1: put on his casuists cloak and try to change the
23:41
Speaker 1: Pope's mind. John Rock's argument in favor of the pill
23:54
Speaker 1: begins with a nice little bit of casuitical taxonomy. On
23:58
Speaker 1: the one hand, he said, there are the barrier contraceptives
24:01
Speaker 1: that the Church has explicitly called sinful condoms, the diaphragm.
24:06
Speaker 1: That is what the Pope was talking about in nineteen
24:09
Speaker 1: when he referred to methods that frustrate the natural power
24:13
Speaker 1: to generate life. On the other hand, though, there was
24:17
Speaker 1: the rhythm method. Rhythm is the idea that a couple
24:21
Speaker 1: might prevent pregnancy by not having sex during a woman's
24:25
Speaker 1: fertile days when she's ovulating. In nineteen fifty one, Pope
24:29
Speaker 1: Pius the twelfth addressed a group of midwives in Italy,
24:32
Speaker 1: and in his speech he explicitly gave his blessing to
24:36
Speaker 1: the rhythm method of birth control. In his statement on
24:38
Speaker 1: the rhythm method, how does he resolve the issue of
24:42
Speaker 1: whether the whether the rhythm method is contraception or not?
24:46
Speaker 8: Oh, just by ignoring it. That's a time honored way
24:49
Speaker 8: of solving problems.
24:51
Speaker 1: That's the historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler, who wrote a brilliant
24:55
Speaker 1: book on the Church's history with contraception.
24:58
Speaker 8: He's speaking to Italian midwives, the Congress of Italian Midwives,
25:01
Speaker 8: and I presume what it reflects is the reality of
25:05
Speaker 8: war torn Italy. You know, of a country that's really
25:08
Speaker 8: been decimated, where people aren't desperately poor. So in fact,
25:12
Speaker 8: he's saying, I know you're facing problems out there. And
25:18
Speaker 8: here is mother Church's pastoral response.
25:22
Speaker 1: So there are some kinds of birth control the Catholic churches, okay,
25:25
Speaker 1: with natural kinds, and there are some kinds. It opposes
25:29
Speaker 1: artificial kinds. But let's descend into the particulars here for
25:33
Speaker 1: a moment. It's not quite true that the rhythm method
25:37
Speaker 1: is perfectly natural, at least not as it was being
25:41
Speaker 1: practiced in the nineteen fifties. Walk the naive listener through
25:45
Speaker 1: what practicing the rhythm method in the fifties met.
25:49
Speaker 8: Right, Well, it was new and improved rhythm in the fifties,
25:52
Speaker 8: and in the beginning, you just you sort of looked
25:55
Speaker 8: at the calendar. You assume that your menstrual period would
25:58
Speaker 8: occur at such and such a point in the cycle,
26:01
Speaker 8: and there'd be no variations, so you just count.
26:03
Speaker 3: Right.
26:04
Speaker 1: This doesn't work very well at preventing pregnancy.
26:07
Speaker 8: The one that dominates in the f these is the
26:09
Speaker 8: so called basal temperature method, whereby apparently when a woman ovulates,
26:15
Speaker 8: they'll be a very slight increase in her body temperature.
26:18
Speaker 8: But that means that every morning you have to take
26:21
Speaker 8: your temperature rectally because that's the most sensitive way, and
26:26
Speaker 8: recorded before you get out of bed, before you do anything,
26:31
Speaker 8: which is not always easy if you already have a
26:33
Speaker 8: house full of young children.
26:34
Speaker 1: Yes, you got seven kids screaming, that's right, and you're
26:37
Speaker 1: taking your temperature rectally.
26:39
Speaker 8: That's right, which in the screaming light, I should think
26:42
Speaker 8: cause your temperature to rise for wholly independent reasons.
26:46
Speaker 1: Templar is Catholic, of course, and as someone who grew
26:49
Speaker 1: up in the nineteen sixties, this is a world she
26:51
Speaker 1: knew intimately.
26:53
Speaker 8: I married into a family where my husband's considerably older brothers,
26:58
Speaker 8: who'd had their kids in the forties and fifties, had
27:01
Speaker 8: ten and twelve each. His only sister, very sensibly joined
27:07
Speaker 8: a religious order and only left after her reproductive years
27:10
Speaker 8: were over, although I don't really think that was her motivation,
27:14
Speaker 8: but who can tell.
27:15
Speaker 1: Birth control was a big part of what Catholics talked
27:18
Speaker 1: and thought about in those years, and Rock is right
27:21
Speaker 1: in the middle of that obsession. He actually runs a
27:24
Speaker 1: rhythm methic clinic in Boston. He's one of the researchers
27:27
Speaker 1: who helps establish when in a woman's cycle ovulation occurs.
27:31
Speaker 1: That's how he makes his reputation. So after John Rock
27:35
Speaker 1: gets FDA approval for his birth control pill, he writes
27:38
Speaker 1: a best selling book called The Time Has Come, where
27:41
Speaker 1: he does a brilliant bit of casuistry. Is the pill
27:45
Speaker 1: more like a classic artificial method like the condom? Or
27:49
Speaker 1: is it more of a semi natural method like rhythm?
27:52
Speaker 1: And ROC's answer in his book is the pill is
27:55
Speaker 1: like rhythm. It uses the very same hormones found in
27:58
Speaker 1: a woman's body, estrogen and progesterone. And what does it do.
28:03
Speaker 1: It mimics pregnancy, which is the most natural of states.
28:07
Speaker 3: The chemical subjects in these pills acts in the body
28:13
Speaker 3: exactly like progesterone to the mother's over reproduces.
28:18
Speaker 1: It's Rock again explaining the science to David Brinkley.
28:22
Speaker 3: And it has the same effect on the regulating mechanism
28:28
Speaker 3: for ripening eggs and for the releasing eggs. If a
28:34
Speaker 3: woman takes the pill month after month after month and
28:42
Speaker 3: continuously not missing any day at all, she is in
28:47
Speaker 3: effect establishing just a pseudo pregnancy and make believe pregnancy
28:53
Speaker 3: early on.
28:54
Speaker 1: Leslie Tetler says, many people in the Catholic Church, important people, theologians,
28:59
Speaker 1: church leaders, sided with Rock's argument.
29:03
Speaker 8: All the language, all the logic of Catholic teaching on
29:07
Speaker 8: contraception presumes barrier method, you know, kind of intervening in
29:12
Speaker 8: the midst of this act. I think many of them
29:15
Speaker 8: see the pill as something completely different. You take the
29:18
Speaker 8: pill in the morning and has nothing to do with
29:19
Speaker 8: the sexual act unless you're in a very unusual relationship,
29:22
Speaker 8: and you don't have to mess about in the genital area,
29:28
Speaker 8: you don't have to think about interrupting the sex act.
29:31
Speaker 8: It's great stuff. You know, it's psychologically unhooked from all
29:36
Speaker 8: the messiness of traditional contraception, and I think theologians into
29:42
Speaker 8: it that this might be a way to pry the
29:44
Speaker 8: whole thing open, to at least create a debate where
29:47
Speaker 8: at least officially none can exist.
29:50
Speaker 1: It helps that Rock is who he is, a doctor
29:53
Speaker 1: on the front lines, who's been serving the Catholic poor
29:56
Speaker 1: of Boston his whole career, listening to the troubles of
29:59
Speaker 1: women who had eight children and too many miscarriages to
30:03
Speaker 1: count all by the time they were thirty. The cardinals
30:07
Speaker 1: and the Pope were on the front lines like he was.
30:11
Speaker 1: They were sitting celibate behind the walls of the Vatican.
30:15
Speaker 8: You take John Paul a second for example. We're leaping
30:18
Speaker 8: ahead a bit from the sixties here, but you know
30:21
Speaker 8: it's still the sixties issues. Yeah, all his talks on
30:25
Speaker 8: theology of the body, which are lovely and lyrical and
30:30
Speaker 8: also make the case for not using contraception, But when
30:35
Speaker 8: you finish reading them, which is hard, you come away
30:38
Speaker 8: with a sense that he's not talking about real bodies,
30:41
Speaker 8: you know, not bodies that get tired, that get hungry,
30:44
Speaker 8: that ache to love someone, that can have too many children,
30:48
Speaker 8: that can get pregnant right now.
30:50
Speaker 1: But that's the weird thing that you have. It's incredibly
30:54
Speaker 1: intimate discussion of female reproduction done by essentially middle aged
31:00
Speaker 1: seven men.
31:01
Speaker 8: Yeah, exactly. And you know, a lot of the men
31:04
Speaker 8: I interviewed because they were ordained in the forties and
31:06
Speaker 8: the fifties, some even in the late thirties, they had
31:11
Speaker 8: gone to seminary at the age of fourteen. And I
31:14
Speaker 8: really think that many of them, certainly during the period
31:18
Speaker 8: of upheople around birth control, had themselves not had sexual experience.
31:22
Speaker 8: All of them said to me, he said, you know,
31:25
Speaker 8: when I was a young priest, I really hated for
31:27
Speaker 8: anyone to confess to sexual sin because I didn't know
31:30
Speaker 8: what I was talking about.
31:33
Speaker 1: In response to Rock's challenge, the Vaticans set up an
31:36
Speaker 1: international commission in the early nineteen sixties seventy two people, theologians,
31:41
Speaker 1: medical experts. They deliberated for three years and they end
31:46
Speaker 1: up voting sixty eight to four in favor of the pill.
31:50
Speaker 1: And what is the Commission's argument for voting in favor
31:54
Speaker 1: a Jesuits argument. They say that you can't make a
31:57
Speaker 1: general rule about contraception, that each case is different, every family,
32:02
Speaker 1: every woman faces her own unique set of issues. When
32:07
Speaker 1: the Pope gave his blessing to the rhythm method, it
32:10
Speaker 1: was because he saw that the women of Italy were
32:12
Speaker 1: suffering in the years after the war, poor overwhelmed that
32:18
Speaker 1: Pope that consideration of the particulars of their situation softened
32:23
Speaker 1: his commitment to principle. In the early nineteen sixties, the
32:28
Speaker 1: Papal Commission took the same position with the pill. The
32:31
Speaker 1: chairman of the majority report was a priest named Joseph Fuchs,
32:36
Speaker 1: and everyone thought he was going to rule against Rock
32:39
Speaker 1: because he was a conservative, but he was also a Jesuit.
32:43
Speaker 13: Funny thing happens is that Fuchs, while he's on the committee,
32:46
Speaker 13: starts listening to the late people on the Commission, and
32:50
Speaker 13: the lay people start talking in a way that they
32:53
Speaker 13: are entertaining particularities that he never entertained.
32:57
Speaker 1: That's father Keenan, who he met in the previous episode
33:01
Speaker 1: The Jesuit Scholar in Rome.
33:03
Speaker 13: Only the married couple fully understands that as a matter
33:06
Speaker 13: of fact, this husband or this mother is going to
33:09
Speaker 13: lose their job. They have to take care of this.
33:12
Speaker 13: They can't stay at home. All of a sudden, all
33:15
Speaker 13: these different issues are not being entertained, and he realizes,
33:19
Speaker 13: we have to be teaching people how to make judgments
33:23
Speaker 13: and conscience because they're going to have circumstances that we
33:26
Speaker 13: can never anticipate, and they're going to have the better
33:30
Speaker 13: ability than we who don't have that information.
33:33
Speaker 1: There are too many cases and too many particulars. So
33:37
Speaker 1: in the end, Fuchs says that the decision ought to
33:39
Speaker 1: lie with the wife and the husband. The birth control
33:43
Speaker 1: is a case that each Catholic must decide for herself.
33:46
Speaker 13: He's teaching that you don't need to go to a
33:49
Speaker 13: priest for a casuist. You have to become a casuist.
33:51
Speaker 13: That's what he's doing.
33:53
Speaker 1: For two years. Pope Paul six pondered the commission's findings. Finally,
33:57
Speaker 1: in the Humani Vitae Encyclical of July twenty eighth, nineteen
34:01
Speaker 1: sixty eight, he made up his mind. He looked back
34:05
Speaker 1: at the nineteen thirty ruling of his predecessor, and he said,
34:10
Speaker 1: all of this elegant casuistry around the pill is irrelevant.
34:14
Speaker 1: I cannot overturn received papal teaching. At the church's crucial moment,
34:20
Speaker 1: when Pope Paul the sixth had the chance to offer
34:22
Speaker 1: consolation to millions of Catholics around the world, he flinched.
34:29
Speaker 1: He put a principle ahead of the particulars. Don't let
34:34
Speaker 1: anyone tell you that the courageous man is the man
34:37
Speaker 1: of principle. The courageous person is actually the one who
34:41
Speaker 1: knows when to put principle aside. John Rock retired to
34:46
Speaker 1: a small town in New Hampshire because he was never
34:49
Speaker 1: interested in charging for his services. He ran out of
34:52
Speaker 1: money in his later years. He had to live simply.
34:56
Speaker 2: He starts as day reading and answering mail critical and
34:59
Speaker 2: otherwise from readers of his book advocating the burst control pill.
35:04
Speaker 1: David Brinkley sat with him in his office and they
35:07
Speaker 1: re enacted his daily ritual. John Rock holds a letter
35:10
Speaker 1: in his hands.
35:11
Speaker 9: Your article in the magazines in regard to birth control
35:14
Speaker 9: as rather nauseating. Did you ever think of the day
35:18
Speaker 9: you would meet your God an account for your work
35:20
Speaker 9: while on earth? I can hardly believe that you or
35:23
Speaker 9: anyone else can interfere with the divine natural law.
35:27
Speaker 3: God will provide. I am I'm sorry I upset your stomach.
35:39
Speaker 3: You may be very sure that I've gone through some
35:44
Speaker 3: entertains myself.
35:46
Speaker 9: Oh this.
35:49
Speaker 3: Problem that I am so concerned.
35:51
Speaker 1: Is for John Rock. His obligation as a Catholic was
35:55
Speaker 1: never to the mute enforcement of natural law. He went
35:59
Speaker 1: into the tenements of Boston remember and felt overwhelming sorrow.
36:05
Speaker 3: As far as meeting my God, I I've been taught
36:10
Speaker 3: and I believe that he's here with me all the time.
36:16
Speaker 3: As I have to meet him every day. I really
36:19
Speaker 3: try to conformed what he tells me. Here's the thing
36:24
Speaker 3: to do.
36:26
Speaker 1: He shared the obligation of the Jesuits to console those
36:30
Speaker 1: in need of consolation.
36:32
Speaker 3: Perhaps I'm a little hard of hearing at times, but
36:37
Speaker 3: I do my best.
36:39
Speaker 1: As Wanda Runners said, I think I love the man.
36:48
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is produced by Mee Label and Jacob Smith
36:53
Speaker 1: with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. FLAONN Williams
36:58
Speaker 1: is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music
37:02
Speaker 1: by Luis Skira. Special thanks to Carle Migliori, Heather Feine,
37:07
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Maya Kaney, and Jacob Iceberg. Revisionist history is
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Speaker 1: brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Badwell.