Spring Break
Anger over Puerto Rico's pill test lingers
By: Ray Quintanilla — krt campus
Issue date: 4/12/04 Section: News
HUMACAO, Puerto Rico - When Delia Mestre was a young woman, a hospital social worker would visit families throughout her barrio, offering the women something that seemed too good to be true: A tiny tablet to keep them from getting pregnant.
"We all jumped on it quickly and didn't look back," Mestre, 60, recalled.
"Women were told this was medicine that would keep them from having children they couldn't support."
Nearly a half-century has passed since doctors began arriving here to begin the longest-running experiment of its kind: nine years of veiled research that helped pave the way for a "magic pill" now regarded as one of the pivotal social and medical changes of the 20th century.
What unfolded from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s in this remote farming town in the foothills near Puerto Rico's east coast made Mestre and hundreds of other women the unwitting pioneers of the modern sexual revolution.
It remains one of the most controversial chapters in the island's history - notably because participants weren't informed that they were guinea pigs in an experiment to test the world's first birth-control pill, a tablet with three times as much hormones as today's version.
There were other test groups on the mainland at the time, but similar experiments in Boston and other cities didn't last very long, partly because of the pill's side effects.
In Humacao, the testing went on for years.
It's difficult to think of those days, said Mestre, among the last generation of Humacao women who took part in the clinical trials of Enovid and a collection of similar drugs that have come to be known universally as "the pill."
Generations later, bitter feelings still simmer. Secrecy about the
experimental nature of the pills helped prompt federal officials to ban such practices.
"The experiments were both good and bad. Why didn't anyone let us make some decisions for ourselves?" she asked, her eyes welling with tears. "I have difficulty explaining that time to my own grown children.
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