WASHINGTON (CNS) — Fifty years ago this May, the Food and Drug Administration gave its approval for the use of a combination of the hormones progesterone and estrogen that the pharmaceutical company Searle said would prevent pregnancy 99.7 percent of the time.

Known simply as “the pill,” it was a development that was heralded as the liberation of women from male domination that would lead to fewer divorces and a steep decline in the number of unwanted pregnancies and in the number of abortions. But statistics show just the opposite.

“It’s very easy to find summaries from that time of everything that was promised,” said Helen Alvare, an associate professor of law at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Va. “There would be greater equality for women; they would no longer be essentially slaves to their biology,” she added. “(The pill) was supposed to reduce unwanted births and the number of people looking for abortions and to increase the well-being of children, because only wanted children would be born.”

But it didn’t turn out that way.

In a talk called “Contraception: Why Not?” that has been reprinted or downloaded more than a million times since it was first delivered in 1994, moral theologian Janet Smith said “it was not a stupid expectation” in the 1960s “that contraceptives would make for better marriages, fewer unwanted pregnancies, fewer abortions. But I think the cultural evidence today shows absolutely the contrary,” added Smith.