Birth Control

Throughout history. women have actively sought safe and effective methods of birth control. Using folk medicine to prevent unwanted pregnancies, women often suffered real physical and psychological illness. The birth control movement was fueled by the desire for effective, mass-produced contraceptives, and it gathered strength from the efforts of women like Margaret Sanger. Commercialized by the mid-nineteenth century, contraceptives were readily available, however, their effectiveness was often dubious. Nonetheless, early attempts to control births prevailed with some success, and by the 1870s the overall birthrate dropped significantly. In contrast, however, by the 1890s the U.S. Catholic population dramatically increased because of eastern European Catholic immigration and strict mandates from the Catholic church that made using birth control a sin. Typically, historians note socioeconomic concerns and health-related issues as guiding factors in the emergence of the American birth control movement, specifically the health hazards brought about through multiple pregnancies and the hardship of rearing numerous children on meager resources. During colonial times women quietly practiced birth control, keeping the topic a private matter. Some practiced a variety of home remedies to prevent pregnancy, and others resorted to abortion as a means of controlling birth, a practice that went unnoticed in a largely rural environment.

As immigration swelled the American urban population during the nineteenth century, poverty became part of the national landscape. Overcrowded tenements were commonplace, and underemployment and unemployment plagued the poor. Maternal and children's health and the need for effective and affordable contraceptives emerged as prominent issues for many American citizens, although not for prosperous industrialists and business owners who benefited from the massive immigrant labor pools. Lower-class individuals could barely afford daily subsistence let alone proper medical treatment. At best, the poor could obtain minimal medical treatment through charitable agencies, such as the public health departments, which some of the larger city governments sponsored. Public health entities, however, often failed to provide substantial health care or offer advice on birth control. And abortions concerned nineteenth-century conservatives, with some state legislatures seeking to restrict or outlaw the procedures.

In urban America, multiple pregnancies, poor health care during gestation, and overwork from childrearing left poor women in precarious health. To complicate matters, mothers were often forced by necessity to hold jobs outside the home, a situation that further eroded their health and led to child neglect. As a result, desperate women who found themselves pregnant repeatedly sometimes resorted to harmful self-induced abortions or abortions performed by the unskilled, which often resulted in severe bodily trauma or death. Women who could afford them used purgatives, plant abstracts, salts, salves, douches, and other agents designed either to prevent pregnancy or to induce menses, thus aborting unwanted children. Abortion practitioners were often arrested and jailed as restrictive laws became more pervasive by midcentury. Some physicians who merely gave out birth control advice or devices were shut down and sometimes jailed. Not only were doctors who attended the working class unwilling to recommend contraceptives, but poor women could not afford available contraceptives like vulcanized rubber condoms that were readily available by the 1830s. Bound by social mores and religious restrictions, especially those for Catholics, men remained reluctant to take charge of birth control. By 1873, restrictive federal laws were in place that forbade the [Page 101]public distribution of contraceptive literature and materials, a situation that resulted in a political control of women's bodies under the guise of controlling vice in society. Yet, many upper- and middle-class women had fewer children and managed to control the number of their births, which suggests that certain classes of Americans were able to obtain the most effective contraceptives throughout the nineteenth century.

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