The FDA backed off from including an insert but did
require doctors to give the information to women
whenever they prescribed the pill. Between 1970 and
1975, however, doctors distributed only four million
copies of the information to the 10 million women for
whom they prescribed the pill every year. It wasn’t until
1978 that the FDA required that the information be inserted
into the pill packages — and it wasn’t until 1980
that the FDA required that the package insert be intelligible
to the average reader (Marks, 2001; Tone, 2001).