Spring Break
Anger over Puerto Rico's pill test lingers
By: Ray Quintanilla — krt campus
Issue date: 4/12/04 Section: News
"I have very mixed feelings about the entire thing."
Humacao is a gritty village tucked between the Cerro and Labarbera mountains. It was here that doctors found their best "control group," starting in 1955.
The doctors provided hundreds of women - descendants of Puerto Rico's jibaro agricultural underclass - with refined versions of the pill for free until 1964 to test its safety and how well it worked.
In the early days, the doctor who ran the tests noted publicly, that two
seemingly healthy women participating in the trials died. No autopsies were done to determine what caused their deaths.
Those who remember the times best recall U.S. doctors, dressed in white lab coats, arriving to deliver their babies. Soon, however, they were recruiting women to try the drug.
Margaret Sanger, the women's activist who in the 1930s first envisioned a "magic pill" to prevent pregnancy, reportedly visited doctors in the town to lend moral support.
In no time, new mothers at Ryder Memorial Hospital were accepting birth-control pills. Physicians dispatched their assistants to rap on doors
throughout the town's slums, telling women they didn't have to have another child if they took the pills regularly.
That's how many of the test recruits were found, said Conchita Santos, 80, a Humacao resident her entire life.
It was only a few years after Puerto Rico became a U.S. commonwealth
that doctors began seeking people to test their pills in these neighborhoods - barrios of small concrete homes where chickens roam and some people still get around on horseback.
Santos and other Roman Catholic women were warned by their parish priests not to take the pills. It was not only a sin, they were told, but it also altered God's will.
Santos, a homemaker, accepted her first package of pills in 1955, shortly after the birth of her first and only child.
By the end of 1957, doctors at Ryder had recruited about 500 participants.
Humacao is a gritty village tucked between the Cerro and Labarbera mountains. It was here that doctors found their best "control group," starting in 1955.
The doctors provided hundreds of women - descendants of Puerto Rico's jibaro agricultural underclass - with refined versions of the pill for free until 1964 to test its safety and how well it worked.
In the early days, the doctor who ran the tests noted publicly, that two
seemingly healthy women participating in the trials died. No autopsies were done to determine what caused their deaths.
Those who remember the times best recall U.S. doctors, dressed in white lab coats, arriving to deliver their babies. Soon, however, they were recruiting women to try the drug.
Margaret Sanger, the women's activist who in the 1930s first envisioned a "magic pill" to prevent pregnancy, reportedly visited doctors in the town to lend moral support.
In no time, new mothers at Ryder Memorial Hospital were accepting birth-control pills. Physicians dispatched their assistants to rap on doors
throughout the town's slums, telling women they didn't have to have another child if they took the pills regularly.
That's how many of the test recruits were found, said Conchita Santos, 80, a Humacao resident her entire life.
It was only a few years after Puerto Rico became a U.S. commonwealth
that doctors began seeking people to test their pills in these neighborhoods - barrios of small concrete homes where chickens roam and some people still get around on horseback.
Santos and other Roman Catholic women were warned by their parish priests not to take the pills. It was not only a sin, they were told, but it also altered God's will.
Santos, a homemaker, accepted her first package of pills in 1955, shortly after the birth of her first and only child.
By the end of 1957, doctors at Ryder had recruited about 500 participants.
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