John Rock

John Rock was a devout Catholic obstetrician who ran the clinical trials of the contraceptive pill and spent his last years arguing, unsuccessfully, that his church should accept it. He was from Marlborough, Massachusetts, took his medical degree at Harvard, and spent his career treating infertility; he opened one of the first clinics in the country for it and was among the first to achieve fertilisation of a human egg outside the body, with Miriam Menkin in 1944. He also taught contraception to Harvard medical students at a time when distributing information about it was a criminal offence in Massachusetts, and campaigned publicly to repeal that law. Gregory Pincus, working on Margaret Sanger's commission with Katharine McCormick's money, needed a clinician of unimpeachable standing to test progesterone as a contraceptive, and Rock's Catholicism was part of why he was chosen. The trials ran in Massachusetts, using infertility patients, and then in Puerto Rico from 1956, where the consent given by the women involved and the reporting of side effects have both been criticised heavily since. The Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid for contraception in 1960. Rock argued in The Time Has Come, published in 1963, that the pill merely extended the natural infertility of the safe period and was therefore permissible under Catholic teaching, and he was a member of the papal commission that recommended change. Paul VI rejected the recommendation in Humanae Vitae in 1968. Rock stopped attending mass afterwards and lived to ninety-four. He continued to insist that he had not left the church but that it had left the question unanswered. The Rock Reproductive Clinic in Brookline ran for years after he retired from Harvard. He kept a picture of his own large family on the wall of a consulting room where he prescribed contraception.

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