But sterilization was not Gamble’s only endeavor in Puerto Rico. He is equally notorious for his role in the subjection of poor women to medical experimentation. In the 1950s Doctors Gregory Pincus and John Rock began testing progesterone on women in Puerto Rico. Gamble expanded the distribution of oral progesterone, accepting donations from pharmaceutical companies who, unable to conduct trials in the US, bid for access to the women in his clinics. Visiting nurses and social workers were dispatched to housing projects in San Juan and to rural areas (Sanger referred to them as “your army of occupation”). The drug, which in considerably smaller doses would later come to be known simply as “The Pill,” was still experimental. Side effects, which included nausea, dizziness, headaches, were dismissed by researchers as psychological or blamed on Puerto Rican women themselves who were constructed as lacking the intellectual sophistication to follow directions. This particular racist and class-based trope was employed in almost every sterilization and population control campaign, either implicitly or explicitly. Deaths by pulmonary tuberculosis and congestive heart failure were likewise deemed irrelevant.