Edris Rice-Wray Carson

Edris Rice-Wray M.D.

Dr. Edris Roushan Rice-Wray Simon (Born in New York City, USA, January 21, 1904, Died in San Andres Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, February 19, 1990)

A pioneer in medical research who helped to prove the worth of the oral contraceptive pill, and worked on the birth-control injection. Benchmark "The Wall Street Journal" was one of the America's 75 most important women, She attended Vassar College Degree, and her specialty was in Medical Public Health, University in Michigan, career as a Medical Doctor at Northwestern University, and had a long career as a public health, attended Cornell University where she was a member of the Alpha Phi sorority. She was a faculty member of the Puerto Rico Medical School and medical director of the Puerto Rico Family Planning Association, she headed the first large scale clinical trials working for over 17 years until the UN (United Nations) called her to work in Mexico, where she founded at 1959 Mexico's first family planning clinic in Mexico City, Benchmark "El Universal (México)" (newspaper of Mexico City) says "it it the First Clinical Planning in Latin America", then she attended several Mexican women and families at Prosalud Maternal Clinic Association, founded in 1963 in Mexico City where she was the director. She headed a large scale, clinical trials of the first birth control pill in the late 1950s.

Some of her job was to report the progress of the pill and effectiveness. In order to prove the safety of "the pill", human trials had to be conducted, Puerto Rico was selected as a trial site in 1955, in part because there was an existing network of birth control clinics serving low-income women on the island. Trials began there in 1956, Some of the women experienced "the pill" (Enovid) and Dr. Rice-Wray wrote Gregory Goodwin Pincus (American biologist and researcher who co-invented the combined oral contraceptive pill) and she reported "gives one hundred percent protection against pregnancy [but causes] some side reactions to be acceptable" every experiment were supervised by Dr. Edris Rice-Wray she always had the advantage of being close to people and meet them clinically, Dr. Rice-Wray never lost interest to make a reality pill and more effective methods for controlling Natality.

Vassar and Nothweastern for Dr. Edris Rice-Wray

Dr. Rice-Wray whit her support team

Prosalud Maternal Clinic Association

There were over 50 publications based on their research Birth control and research that she made; in Life magazine at the 1970s was published "Dr. Edris Rice-Wray an important woman of the decade"

She received several awards for her work in publicizing the effectiveness and benefits of the pill in Latin America, she was the recipient of Planned Parenthood Federation of America's and recived the Margaret Sanger Award in 1978. She cared Public Health and wellness for global nation it's why she made a lot of speeches about "the worth of the contraceptive pill", "Equality of Man and Woman", "The Facts of contraceptive methods", "the problem for mothers who abort", "population growth", "the population in subsequent years", etc. in 1965 made a speech with Alan Guttmacher president of the Family Planning Clinic U.S.A. on population growth and demand for services and foodstuffs for nations and how hard it will be for the years of 2000

Without the contributions of key women, the Pill may never have been created.

“Mothers of the Birth Control Pill” – Margaret Sanger, Katharine McCormick and Edris Rice-Wraythanks to those three women the pill know a days exist; May 11, 1960 went on sale for the first time the contraceptive pill.

Dr. Edris Rice-Wray was the medical director of the Family Planning Association in Puerto Rico in 1955 an in Mexico in 1959. the initial clinical trial of the Birth Control Pill (BCP)^[1]

Edris Rice-Wray M.D. Consulting Medically people with low income

, to help determine the proper dose of synthetic progesterone was floundering making a great wonderful and necessary work.

In February 1956, Dr. Rice-Wray was visited by Dr. Gregory Pincus. She agreed to supervise a much larger trial of Birth Control Pill (BCP) in her public health unit in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico (a low-income housing development in a suburb of San Juan, Puerto Rico). With the assistance of a social worker, Iris Rodrigues, Dr. Rice-Wray began recruiting married women with known fertility to participate in a clinical trial of the Birth Control Pill (BCP). A treatment group of 100 women was compared to a group of 125 condom or diaphragm users. Of the initial 100 women participants, 30 dropped out because of side effects and an adverse newspaper story. There were many willing participants who were anxious to take the places of those who dropped out. Not surprisingly, once the word was out, more than just low-income women tried to enroll in the study. Educated women also came to the clinic to ask for the Birth Control Pill (BCP).

Because of her work with the birth control pill, Dr. Rice-Wray was pressured to resign by the Puerto Rican Secretary of Health. But before she left to accept a position with World Health Organization (WHO) in December of 1956, Rice-Wray reported that 221 women, taking the Birth Control Pill (BCP)^[2] correctly, had not had a single pregnancy. Fortunately, she continued her work while with the WHO in Mexico. She also helped organize the Birth Control Pill (BCP) clinical trials in Haiti in 1957. The majority of early clinical data about Birth Control Pill (BCP) can be linked to the efforts of Dr. Rice-Wray and her collaborators. With this groundwork, BCPs could be brought before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Cholula Medical Association,grants: Edris Rice-Wray M.D. M.P.H.the distinction of Partner EmeritusCholula, July 26, 1985President: Dr. Enrique Espinoza Tecuatl

By the 1970s she moved to Puebla, in the municipality of Cholula where she worked as Professor at UDLA (University of the Americas Puebla) in the fields of Ecology, Anthropology and Population Studies, where she continues to have medical consultations helping and contributing knowledge to medicine in San Pedro Cholula and San Andrés Cholula, Puebla including contraceptive pill.

During the last days of her life, she lived in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, and died at her home in San Andres Cholula, accompanied by her daughters and grandchildren.

She was of the Bahá'í (Bahá'í Faith in Mexico) ^[3] faith.

Dr. Rice-Wray in a conference in Mexicali

Bahá'í Book "Portales de la Libertad" published in México by Dr. Edris Rice-Wray ^[4]

In Google you can find and research more work and history of the Dr. Edris Rice-Wray

Book review:The Birth of the Pill^[5]

Crocodile dung, weasel bone, beaver testicles: These are just three of the unlikely ingredients humans have used in attempts to prevent pregnancy over the centuries. But it was, finally, rabbit progesterone, and a mixture of medicinal plants that provided the key to safe, effective birth control, and thereby hangs a gripping tale, one that Jonathan Eig tells with suspense and panache in “The Birth of the Pill.”

The story begins in 1950, with a meeting one winter night “high above Park Avenue” between “an old woman who loved sex” and a scientist once compared in the press to Frankenstein. The woman was Margaret Sanger, who had spent 40 years in a crusade to start the organization that became Planned Parenthood. The scientist was Gregory Pincus, author of controversial attempts to breed rabbits in a Petri dish. Sanger explained to Pincus her lifelong dream, an idea so outrageous as to seem magical: a cheap, simple birth-control method that would allow sex to be spontaneous — no risking mistakes in the heat of the moment. A woman should be able to use it without her sexual partner’s knowledge. It had to be safe and reversible, so that if the woman wanted to get pregnant, she could. A pill would be best. Can you do that? Sanger asked Pincus. He thought he could.

It is hard to recall today just how radical this proposition was in 1950. Sanger’s quest was to free women to have sex without the fear or possibility of pregnancy, thus allowing them to pursue education, careers, equal footing with men. The available birth control, in the form of condoms and diaphragms, had a high failure rate. Women were desperate to control the size of their families, as evidenced by the 250,000 letters Sanger received asking for help: “ ‘I am 30 years old . . . and have 11 children . . . kidney and heart disease. . . . Mrs. Sanger can you please help me. I have miss [sic] a few weeks and don’t know how to bring myself around. . . . I have cryed my self [sic] sick. . . . The doctor won’t do anything for me. . . . Doctors are men and have not had a baby so they have no pitty [sic].’– J.M.”

While this book might have benefited from more detail illustrating the hard lives of women before the advent of the pill, it does a masterful job explaining the imagination, perseverance and daring it took to ease their plight. In the 1950s, in most of the United States, dissemination of birth control or information about it was illegal because of “obscenity” laws. Violating those laws, Sanger was arrested many times in her long career, with a trial judge ruling in 1917 that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”

“The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution” by Jonathan Eig. (W. W. Norton)

Book review ‘The Birth of the Pill,’

Pincus, too, was a risk-taker, denied a post at Harvard for his radical experiments with in vitro fertilization. But with $2,000 from Sanger and Planned Parenthood, he set up a lab in Worcester, Mass., with two other scientists, M.C. Chang and Hudson Hoagland. They began testing female rabbits by injecting them with the hormone progesterone. Pincus found that, despite prolific mating habits, they did not get pregnant. The excitement engendered by this discovery is as thrilling to read about as Edison’s “light bulb moments” or Curie’s discovery of radium. Scientific inquiry, not profit, motivated Pincus (he declined to patent his research), but he needed more money to continue his work.

Enter Katharine McCormick. She was “fierce and lovely,” one of the first women to graduate with a degree from MIT and the heiress to a vast fortune. She had befriended Sanger, helping to open the first family-planning clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. One of the many marvelous anecdotes in this book tells how, in 1923, the daring McCormick helped to smuggle diaphragms from Europe by having 1,000 of them sewn into the hems of haute couture clothes and shipped to the United States by the trunkload. In 1952, she began funding Pincus’s research.

More than money, Pincus needed human test subjects. He was confident that women would eagerly try a new birth-control method, even a risky one. For centuries women had employed dangerous means to end unwanted pregnancies — syringed themselves with lye and turpentine, used probes, ingested potions of Spanish fly and tansy oil. The problem for Pincus would be how to stretch “the boundaries of law and ethics” to test progesterone on women. He needed the help of a reputable doctor.

John Rock was his man, head of the sterility clinic at the Free Hospital for Women in Boston. He had had some success in treating female fertility problems by giving his patients progesterone and estrogen. Though a devout Catholic, Rock listened when his patients explained the complexities of women’s lives: some scarred by botched abortions, others in ill health because of multiple pregnancies, many trying to raise more children than they could support. Scores of his patients begged him for a hysterectomy: It was the only method that would “guarantee an end to their baby-making days.” “As compassion . . . overwhelmed his compulsion to toe the Church’s line,” Rock’s religious views changed.

Pincus began progesterone trials with some of Rock’s patients. The team later recruited nurses and tested mental patients without their consent. The tests were an enormous burden: Participants endured endometrial biopsies, daily vaginal smears, temperature-monitoring and side effects such as nausea. Few women could stand the routine long enough to get reliable results. Eventually, the team turned to Edris Rice-Wray M.D., a doctor in Puerto Rico. A “rebel,” she wanted to help the island’s impoverished mothers limit the number of children they bore (an average of 6.8 per woman). Beginning in 1956, progesterone was dispensed to women in Puerto Rico and Haiti. These trial subjects are unsung heroines here. About this ethically questionable phase of human testing, Eig writes that the scientists violated two protocols of modern medical research. They didn’t inform the patients of the purpose of the study or warn them of possible risks. “Was it dishonest?” Eig asks. “Most would say yes. But it did not violate any of the laws or medical standards of the day.” The scientists were lucky: Their drug proved safe, and it worked.

In 1960, the FDA approved the pill for use as birth control in the United States. Rock lobbied the pope for a blessing, too, certain that Catholics would agree that the pill was merely a refinement of the church-sanctioned “rhythm method” because it used the body’s natural hormones to control fertility. But in 1968, a papal encyclical dashed these hopes. Rock, for his efforts, was called “a moral rapist”; but among the 100 million women worldwide who take the pill today are many Catholics who ignore the church’s teachings, no doubt because, as a 1950s joke goes: “What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method? Mommy.”

The story of four “brave, rebellious misfits,” “The Birth of the Pill” brims with fascinating detail, such as the forgotten fact that Prescott Bush — father and grandfather to presidents — served as treasurer for Planned Parenthood’s first fundraising campaign, in 1947. In our times, when progress on women’s reproductive health is undone and held hostage to the religious right, when legislatures and courts threaten to negate the miracles of science and human progress so dazzlingly portrayed here, Eig’s book is essential reading.

THE BIRTH OF THE PILL

How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

By Jonathan Eig

Norton. 388 pp.

References

Tone, Andrea (2001). Devices and Desires. New York: Hill and Wang, A Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-8090-3817-X.

Edris Rice-Wray Carson

Book review:The Birth of the Pill[5]

See also

References

References

Book review:The Birth of the Pill^[5]