Pills in White & Pink

To the half-dozen kinds of oral contraceptives already on the U.S. market, all of which work on essentially the same principle, yet another was added last week. This one, say the manufacturers, works differently.

As nature has worked things out, a woman secretes a moderate amount of estrogenic hormones during the first ten or twelve days of her menstrual cycle. At about the time she ovulates, releasing into her Fallopian tubes an egg ready for fertilization, her output of estrogens rises sharply. Had it been at this higher level all along, she never would have ovulated. Soon after ovulation, estrogen output declines and there is a sudden increase in a different hormone--progesterone, sometimes called "nature's contraceptive," which prevents ovulation until the next cycle.

Until now, U.S. pills have relied on a synthetic progestin, akin to but more powerful than natural progesterone, to prevent ovulation by spreading its abundance over 20 days in mid-cycle. Only a minute quantity of estrogen was put in the same pill to reduce side effects. But as long as 20 years ago, Boston's Dr. Fuller Albright pointed out that a high level of estrogens in the first two-thirds of the cycle would prevent ovulation. To him, this indicated a practicable method of contraception.

The pills now approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for marketing by Mead Johnson & Co. rely on the Albright proposal. Called "sequential therapy," the new system uses 21 pills neatly stacked in a tube--16 white on top and five pink at the bottom. Working down the tube, a woman takes the first white pill (an estrogen) five days after beginning menstruation, and carries on with the white pills on a one-a-day schedule until they are finished. Then she takes the pink pills (a progestin) daily for five days. By thus imitating nature, say Mead Johnson and its medical investigators, the new pills provide almost 100% protection against conception, and they have almost no side effects.

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