Birth Control

BIRTH CONTROL

BIRTH CONTROL. The term "birth control" was coined by Margaret Sanger in 1921, when she founded the American Birth Control League (later Planned Parenthood). She believed that women should have control over their own bodies and their own pregnancies. Though she recognized birth control in larger social and political contexts and was criticized for working too closely with the eugenics movement, she saw it clearly as a health issue for women. Sanger worked as a nurse in New York City's "Hell's Kitchen" and saw women's health suffering as the result of many pregnancies. Her own mother died of tuberculosis after bearing eleven children.

Sanger had promoted the use of birth control in the decade before 1921 as a means to less restrictive sexuality for women. But such claims were considered far too radical and would not facilitate legalizing contraceptives. Contraceptives had become illegal in the United States in 1873 in a Victorian purity crusade led by Anthony Comstock. For centuries, couples had used a variety of methods of birth control—animal skin condoms, vaginal sponges, douches, abstinence, abortion—but nineteenth-century technology brought rubber condoms into mass production and the mass market. The Comstock laws prohibited all contraceptives and contraceptive information, categorizing them as obscenity. The movement to make them legal again would gain momentum with the aid of the American Medical Association, which promoted birth control as a public health issue.

More permissive attitudes toward sexual behavior developed in the twentieth century—flappers of the 1920s flaunted apparent promiscuity, and by the 1940s the automobile allowed for more privacy in dating, and vending machines were dispensing condoms. Still, numbers of un-married women having sexual intercourse remained comparatively low until the 1960s. Contraceptives were generally intended for, and used by, married couples. The sexual revolution and the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s would change that. The United States Supreme Court ruled against a Connecticut law prohibiting the dispensing of contraceptives to married couples in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), a move that paralleled changing attitudes toward birth control in American society. The women's movement embraced reproductive rights as fundamental to progress for women in the workplace, education, and politics, as they could more easily limit their family size.

The birth control pill was promoted as liberating for women as it did not interfere in the act of sexual inter-course, and it was nearly 100 percent effective. In turn, it was embraced by men, as women became less inhibited in sex because the fear of pregnancy was removed. Other forms of contraceptives such as intrauterine devices and Norplant were marketed in subsequent decades, and while each involved risks, women readily accepted them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gordon, Linda. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Tone, Andrea. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Kathleen A. Tobin

See also Griswold v. Connecticut .