Early Life and Career
Rock was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University medical school in 1918 and founded his own medical practice a few years later. Rock and his wife raised five children.
Rock was a pioneer in in vitro fertilization and sperm freezing. He helped many of his patients achieve pregnancy and became known as a "ground-breaking infertility specialist."
As his career progressed, Rock also became known for his acceptance of birth control. (Birth control was illegal in Massachusetts until the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut.) In the 1930s, he founded a clinic to teach the rhythm method, the only birth control accepted by the Catholic Church. In 1931, Rock was the only Catholic doctor to sign a petition to legalize birth control. In the 1940s, he taught at Harvard Medical School - and included birth control methods in his curriculum. Rock also coauthored a birth control guide for the general reader, titled Voluntary Parenthood and published in 1949.
Read more about this topic: John Rock (American Scientist)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better.... Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)