History Should Haunt Us

There's a new play opening this week, and I'm a character in it. I have mixed feelings. The play is called 'The Birth of the Pill,' and it's adapted from my 2014 book of the same name. Rather than merely transferring the story from book to stage, the playwright Jessica Huang explores what I left out — and calls me to task for it. We all should embrace and even celebrate history's messy nature: Question it, debate it, get down in the dirt and wrestle with it. When Ms. Huang asked if I would be a character in her play, I said yes. I said that I had never felt ownership of the story. How could I? History is a conversation, and I never intended to do all the talking. History is also an exercise in failure; the goal is to fail as little as possible, but those of us who write history will always get things wrong and leave things out. Both the book and the play focus on the people who invented the birth control pill and delivered it to the world, largely in the 1950s when anti-birth control laws were still on the books and the idea of selling a drug designed to promote pleasurable sex, reproductive freedom and women's equality was considered preposterous by many. My book focused on Margaret Sanger, the controversial visionary and activist; Katharine Dexter McCormick, the brilliant philanthropist; Gregory Pincus, the outcast biologist who figured out the science; and John Rock, the Catholic gynecologist who supervised the clinical trials. They were flawed rebels out to blow up the world. In Ms. Huang's adaptation, the star is a fictionalized young Puerto Rican woman named Ramona Delgado. As the play begins, it's both 1950 and 2026, and the audience sees Ramona onstage reading my book. She's not happy. She thinks the book should have centered on the Puerto Rican women upon whom the pill was tested before it was approved, when doses were much too high, when serious side effects ran rampant and when women in Puerto Rico and elsewhere were not told they were part of a clinical trial. Ms. Sanger, Ms. McCormick, Dr. Pincus and Dr. Rock had their turns at shaping history. Jonathan Eig had his chance to tell the story. Now, courtesy of Ms. Huang, it's Ramona's turn, and she wants answers. This is not the way I had dreamed of seeing one of my books onstage. On the other hand, Ramona raises issues that I've been wrestling with a long time. The older I get, the less I seem to know. And the older my books get, the more I can see what I've left out or not properly emphasized. I've come to understand that history never contains the whole of history. In my book on Jackie Robinson, I paid scant attention to the Negro League players who never made it to the major leagues. In my book on Martin Luther King Jr., I devoted little space to the role of the labor movement in the civil rights struggle. In my pill book, while I do talk about the treatment of Puerto Rican women in the trials, I failed to convey their suffering. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.