When birth control pills were available in Europe but not in the United States, American women created an uproar about how the unwillingness to make the pill available showed a contempt for the lives of women who might die in childbirth or via abortions. But when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released birth control pills with dosages of hormones that were later found to be unnecessarily high, they were attacked for not caring about women enough to do the necessary tests to make the dosage level as low as possible.64
In brief, when women’s lives were at stake we stumbled all over ourselves until we were caught between a rock and a hard place. When men’s lives were at stake, even readily available data sat dormant for more than half a century without a single person studying it.