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There’s no denying that the birth control pill, which this year will mark its 50th anniversary, has made life easier for millions of women around the world, even as the Catholic Church continues to forbid its use.

The first oral contraceptive, called Evonid, was introduced in the United States on Aug. 18, 1960. It quickly became available in other countries.

“The pill is a milestone in the history of emancipation,” said feminist Alice Schwarzer in an interview with the Deutsche Presse-Agentur. She described herself as a member of the generation of women who came of age before having access to the pill and living in fear of an unwanted pregnancy. She believes Carl Djerassi, a key researcher in the development of the pill, deserves a monument in his name.

“The pill and the possibility to have an abortion were significant achievements for women that raised their quality of life,” said Maureen Cronin, chief of medicine in the area of women’s health at Bayer-Schering, referring to the results of a study conducted in Europe in which about 500,000 women participated.

According to Norbert Paul of Mainz, a professor of the history, theory and ethics of medicine, up to 120 million women worldwide take hormonal contraceptives. They are most popular in northern and central Europe, where about 40 to 60 percent of women of childbearing age take the pill every day.

The Catholic Church, however, has an entirely different view of the advent of the pill in women’s lives. To mark the anniversary of the Vatican’s “pill encyclical” in 1968 — in Latin, humanea vitae , or of human life, Pope Benedict XVI affirmed the rejection of all forms of artificial contraception. The 1968 encyclical signed by Pope Paul VI was an instructional letter to Catholics about the propagation of human life.

The encyclical was controversial and it was the last one issued by Pope Paul, although his tenure as pope lasted another 10 years. In 2008 Pope Benedict said the topic was controversial “yet so crucial for humanity’s future.” Humanae vitae became a sign of “continuity of the church’s doctrine and tradition ... what was true yesterday is true also today,” he said.

The Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano has been very outspoken on the subject of the pill, which it views as a threat not only to human morals, but also to human biology. The “tons of hormones” that women who take the pill have swallowed and consequently put into circulation through excretion have disrupted the environment and made men infertile, the newspaper wrote in January 2009. The pill is an important cause of increasing sterility among men in the Western world, it asserted.

While the alleged danger for male potency has not been proved, side effects for women such as depression and weight gain have been acknowledged. Much more dangerous is the increased risk of thrombosis, particularly among overweight women over the age of 30 who also smoke. Gynecologists advise women to weigh the benefits against the risks of taking the pill. Critics of the pill warn it can also increase the risk of cancer.

In many Islamic countries the pill is being used as birth control by married women, also allowing the women time to recover between pregnancies, Paul said. Additionally, it is used among Muslim women to postpone their period so that women can go to a mosque’s prayer area on religious holidays. According to Islam, women are considered unclean when they are on their period and are restricted from the prayer area of a mosque.

In China, where traditional medicine plays a major role in society, the pill has had difficulty despite the state-ordered one-child policy and partial state-subsidizing of contraceptives that are offered by state medical authorities.

There is one indisputable change the pill has brought the world: the separation of sex and reproduction.

Paul, however, says that this is an important step on the path to the control of biology, which reached a summit when in-vitro fertilization became possible. The procedure relies on the use of artificial hormones to both control the ovaries and to support any pregnancy that occurs after eggs are fertilized outside a woman’s body and transferred to the uterus.

“The greater societal revolution is not that thanks to the pill we can have sex without reproducing, rather it is that through a laboratory procedure we can reproduce without having sex,” he said.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur