This commentary article by Elaine Tyler May puts the focus where it belongs when the topic is the Pill.

Motherhood.

The birth control pill enabled women to go to college—medical school, even—confident that no surprises would derail their educations. An educated mother is a huge advantage for a child in too many ways to count.

The birth control pill enabled women to choose how many children they wanted and felt that they could provide for rather than letting Nature decide for her. It is a huge advantage for a child to be in a family with the ability to provide for the number of children in it. Not hard to do that math.

The birth control pill enabled women to become what employers finally deemed reliable. The old cliche about as soon as a woman was trained or advancing, she’d just go home to have babies faded slowly. Too slowly. But it did finally disappear.

The Pill was really one of the best Mother’s Day gifts a woman could have.

The search for what became the Pill began with Margaret Sanger in 1912. She launched the movement to empower women as mothers.

The Washington Post

“Forget the single girl and the sexual revolution. The pill was not anti-mother; it was for mothers. And it changed motherhood more than it changed anything else. Its great accomplishment was not in preventing motherhood, but in making it better by allowing women to have children on their own terms.

“Today, we celebrate both motherhood and the pill. It is Mother’s Day, and it is the 50th anniversary of the day the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would approve the pill — though the dream of an oral contraceptive is much older. The birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger first envisioned such a “magic pill” in 1912, two years before Congress established a national Mother’s Day. She wanted to do more than honor mothers: She wanted to change their lives.”

Source: Washington Post, May 9, 2010