Coined "The Pill"

"How can we control the vast impersonal forces that now menace our hard-won freedoms? On the verbal level and in general terms, the question may be answered with the utmost ease. Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done? Obviously we must, with all possi ble speed, reduce the birth rate to the point where it does not exceed the death rate. At the same time we must, with all possible speed, increase food produc tion, we must institute and implement a world-wide policy for conserving our soils and our forests, we must develop practical substitutes, preferably less dan gerous and less rapidly exhaustible than uranium, for our present fuels; and, while husbanding our dwin dling resources of easily available minerals, we must work out new and not too costly methods for extract ing these minerals from ever poorer and poorer ores — the poorest ore of all being sea water. But all this, needless to say, is almost infinitely easier said than done. The annual increase of numbers should be re duced. But how? We are given two choices — famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control — and im mediately find ourselves confronted by a problem that is simultaneously a puzzle in physiology, pharmacol ogy, sociology, psychology and even theology. "The Pill" has not yet been invented. When and if it is invented, how can it be distributed to the many hundreds of millions of potential mothers (or, if it is a pill that works upon the male, potential fathers) who will have to take it if the birth rate of the species is to be reduced? And, given existing social customs and the forces of cultural and psychological inertia, how can those who ought to take the pill, but don't want to, be persuaded to change their minds? And what about the objections on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, to any form of birth control except the so-called Rhythm Method — a method, incidentally, which has proved, hitherto, to be almost completely in effective in reducing the birth rate of those industrially backward societies where such a reduction is most urgently necessary? And these questions about the future, hypothetical Pill must be asked, with as little prospect of eliciting satisfactory answers, about the chemical and mechanical methods of birth control already available."

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Revisited, final chapter,