This past week birth control pills turned 50 years old, spurring a number of retrospectives on their impact and evolution. As a teenage girl reading through these articles reminds me just how revolutionary these miracle pills were, tiny tablets that allowed women to better control their chances of pregnancy, as well as giving them new freedoms that they’d never experienced before.

What I see now as a small pill to pop at ten every night, women in the 1960’s saw as something new and radical and amazing. While the pill has received opposition from popes and churches, individuals and groups, its impact and importance have shaped modern society. The pill has allowed people to make more choices on when they begin having families, arguably creating a greater amount of good parents, people who made the conscious decision to have children, instead of leaving people with accidental pregnancies and children they didn’t particularly want or weren’t prepared for. It has given women peace of mind, it had regulated periods, it has allowed hormones to be balanced and security to be felt. With this momentous ability to choose, women were truly given the opportunity to be pro-choice and to take control over their own bodies and lives.

The issue of birth control is still one that survives today though. Despite the fact that my friends and I understand the implications of such pills and realize their existence and the fact that they are necessary in order to feel safe and protected, there are many barriers still in our way. For instance, certain insurances do not cover birth control. A handful of insurances that don’t cover birth control do cover Viagra though, as it is obviously more medically necessary than protection from pregnancy. Some parents refuse to let their daughters get prescriptions for the pill, fearing that it will only be an encouragement for them to have sex. The emergence of the pill is often correlated to the sexual revolution and fluidity of the late 1960’s, and though it is partially responsible for it, allowing women to engage in behavior unrestricted by fears of pregnancy, I personally feel that today the pill doesn’t attract and promote promiscuity.

There are issues with the pill’s past. It was originally tested on uninformed subjects when the effects were not fully known or understood. It has had inherent flaws and side effects that have forced certain brands to be pulled off of the market because of health and safety implications for women taking it. As with all medications, some small groups of people find that the costs are greater than the benefits, and there are always some costs. But these issues exist in every medicine we take, and many drugs are important to our health, and as an average and healthy American girl, I can strongly say that the most important one that I take comes in a foil rectangle with a tiny pill for every day.