The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the Birth Control Pill today, 50 years ago on May 9, 1960.

In an interview with Professor Elizabeth Tyler May about her new book America + The Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, the author says that millions of women immediately started taking the Pill, millions of married women.

Polls taken at the time indicated that single women who weren’t having sex didn’t start because of the pill but singles who already were sexually active were enthusiastic because they figured they would enjoy sex more fully.  Trouble was, it was very difficult for single women to get.

If large numbers of sexually active single women had used it, Tyler May imagines there would have been a notable decline in abortions as well as out-of-wedlock births. But that didn’t happen.