(CBS) This week is the 50th anniversary of the pill, a medical breakthrough that has changed society and the sexual landscape forever.
It still has critics, but 100 million women around the world use it to control when and how many times they become pregnant.
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards told CBS News, "The invention of the birth control pill revolutionized life for women in America. It's completely changed women's options."
The Pill promised to free women from biological bonds, and it did just that.
In the 1950s, women made up about a third of the workforce. Today, women hold nearly half of all U.S. jobs. In the 1950s, American women on average had 3.8 children. Today, that number has dropped to 2.1.
Richards said, "It made them able to pursue high education, pursue careers and plan the size of their families, which was something they could never do before."
For the first decade after its creation, the pill could only be legally prescribed to married women. However, even with that condition, it was condemned by the Catholic Church and many conservatives.
Historian Ellen Chesler, author of "Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America," said, "It was really considered immoral to suggest that women's primary role should not be that of wife and mother, but rather that women should have rights to experience their sexuality free of consequence, just like men have always done."
Gloria Steinem, a longtime leading feminist, said on "The Early Show" Thursday that sexual acceptance with The Pill was the subject of her first piece in Esquire magazine in 1962.
"I ended up saying that the problem was the acceptance of women's sexuality, as much as the women's ability to control it. Were there enough liberated men to go around to the newly liberated women? Which turned out to be kind of prescient."
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