John Rock (American scientist)

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John Rock
John Rock
Born	24 March 1890
Died	4 December 1984
Known for	birth control pill

John Rock (24 March 1890 - 4 December 1984) was one of the inventors of the birth control pill. He had five children and nineteen grandchildren, and regularly attended Catholic mass.

In the years immediately after the Pill was approved by the F.D.A., in 1960, Rock was everywhere. He appeared in interviews and documentaries on CBS and NBC, in Time Magazine, Newsweek, Life Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post. He toured the country tirelessly. He wrote a widely discussed book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor's Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control, which was translated into French, German, and Dutch.

At Harvard Medical School, he taught obstetrics and gynecology for more than three decades. In the nineteen-thirties, at the Free Hospital for Women in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had started the country's first rhythm clinic for educating Catholic couples in natural contraception. He was a pioneer in in-vitro fertilization and the freezing of sperm cells, and was the first to extract an intact fertilized egg. The Pill was his crowning achievement. His two collaborators, Gregory Pincus and Min- Cheuh Chang, worked out the mechanism. He shepherded the drug through its clinical trials.

John Rock believed the Catholic Church would approve use of the birth control pill, and based his position on the 1951 acceptance of the Rhythm Method by Pope Pius XII. The reasoning given by the pope was that the Rhythm Method did not kill the sperm, like a spermicide, or frustrate the normal process of procreation, like a diaphragm, or mutilate the organs, like sterilization. John Rock believed that the pill should be considered a natural method of birth control. The pill in part suppressed ovulation with progesterone, the same way a woman's body suppresses ovulation during pregnancy. And it did not kill sperm, mutilate organs, or involve a physical barrier in the reproductive tract.

In 1958, Pope Pius XII approved the Pill for Catholics, so long as its contraceptive effects were "indirect"--that is, so long as it was intended only as a remedy for conditions like painful menses or "a disease of the uterus." Rock advocated use of the pill for irregular menstrual cycles, which would have made it a moral birth control for women who would have had difficulty using the Rhythm Method. This reasoning was part of the motivation for choosing a four-week cycle for packaging the pill: if an obviously artificial length had been selected, it would have hurt his moral argument that the pill "regulated" the menstrual cycle.

Rock was profoundly disappointed by the 1968 release of the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which categorized oral contraceptives as immoral along with all other artificial methods of birth control.