“They absolutely could’ve been imprisoned for some of the work they were doing,” Jonathan Eig, the author of a new book, told NRP about the early history of the birth control pill and the people who created it.

Eig’s book “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution” details, in part, how the creators of the pill lied to patients and the public.

“We know it simply as ‘the pill,’ yet its genesis was anything but simple,” the book’s description on its publisher’s website reads.

The main players in the book are feminist Margaret Sanger, the wealthy Katharine McCormick, the axed Harvard scientist Gregory Pincus and Catholic gynecologist John Rock.

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