The pill, often called one of the first lifestyle drugs, was designed to be consumed not by sick patients to treat an illness, but by healthy women to prevent pregnancies. Moreover, it has influenced patient-doctor relationships, as women started to openly request this prescription drug. Furthermore, the debates about side effects of the pill were crucial in setting contemporary standards for testing and legal regulation of drugs. While the introduction of oral contraceptives onto international drug markets has been extensively studied, less attention has been paid to how these drugs were introduced and circulated in countries with non-democratic regimes, with their specific market regulations and drug policies. In this paper, I demonstrate how pharmaceutical companies’ possibilities of introducing their products to the Polish and Spanish markets were delineated by political and economical concerns that also affected the doctors’ interest in these drugs and women’s access to them. In Spain, the circulation of the pill grew from 1964 onwards. However, it was not marketed there as a contraceptive until the late 1970s, because the right-wing, conservative, Catholic regime of General Franco established laws which prohibited sale and advertising of contraception. Instead, pharmaceutical companies introduced their products as therapeutic drugs for menstrual disorders. The Spanish medical press of the 1960s commented that gynaecologists expressed scientific interest in these new drugs but in many cases rejected them on the grounds of religious beliefs. During the 1970s, however, some more liberal doctors advocated women’s access to birth control. The importance of Catholicism in the public sphere and medical profession during the Francoist regime did not completely prevent women, especially those from middle and upper classes, from accessing the pill, and its sales rose steadily along the 1970s, but the pill did not and has not become first-choice contraceptive method in Spain. In socialist Poland, where there were no legal limitations to contraception, and abortion had been widely practised since its legalisation in 1956, gynaecologists, as their Spanish counterparts, started to work with different brands of Western contraceptive pills in the early 1960s. In 1969, the first commercial Polish pill, "Femigen", was produced. During the 1970s, pharmaceutical companies outside the Eastern bloc could not access these markets, hence only few brands of oral contraceptives were available in Poland, most of which were manufactured by the national pharmaceutical industry. The circulation of the pill was limited, and despite the declared favourable attitude of the state socialist regime towards birth control, the pill had not become a method of choice among Polish women.