The subject of this week's cover story cost, as TIME noted, just 11 cents to make per unit—but, in the less than a decade of its existence, it had already "changed and liberated the sex and family life of a large and still growing segment of the U.S. population" and seemed primed to "go far toward eliminating hunger, want and ignorance" by helping to control the world population.That subject was, of course, the pill. This fascinating examination of the history, mechanisms and implications of oral contraceptives manages to be both a reassurance about a new medical possibility to a nervous public — one that remembered the recent tragedy that was thalidomide, when women quick to take a miracle drug found out too late that it caused birth defects — and a forward-looking story about birth-control innovation of the sort that might still run in the pages of TIME today.

Read more at time.com