The first part of this memoir is a well-reasoned apologetic on the pill's origins and its benefits to women, where Djerassi follows familiar debunkings: of fundamentalists, on the one hand, who regarded the pill as "a symbol, if not an agent, of what they perceived as a pervasive moral decline," and of feminists, on the other, who he says viewed the manmade contraceptive as the supreme gesture of patriarchy. The balance of this book, however, explores how the pill altered the rules of the author's own life, raising his awareness of the social consequences arising from scientific and technological developments.