Contraception

Contraception refers to the numerous methods and devices used to prevent conception and pregnancy. For millennia, women and men have relied on such folk and medical methods as condoms, herbs, vaginal suppositories, douching, and magic rituals and potions—along with abortion and infanticide—as means to control the birth of children. Today contraceptives include medically prescribed hormones for women; condoms, diaphragms, and other barriers; behavioral practices, including withdrawal and the rhythm method; and irreversible male and female sterilization. Although there are a number of contraceptive options with varying levels of reliability and effectiveness, use is circumscribed by access and availability, as well as by legal and cultural restraints.

Because contraception separates intercourse from procreation, it raises moral and legal issues. The Catholic Church and some other religious institutions have long morally condemned contraception as a mortal sin. However, legal prohibitions in the United States against contraception and the advertisement and sale of contraceptives did not arise until 1873 with the passage of the Comstock Law. This law made it illegal to distribute “obscene” material through the mail, thus effectively banning contraceptives for Americans.

In 1914, Margaret Sanger, who would go on to found Planned Parenthood, was charged with violating the Comstock Law when she urged women to limit their pregnancies in her socialist journal, The Woman Rebel, coining the term birth control to emphasize women's agency in procreative decision making. Sanger, along with other birth control advocates, promoted contraception in publications, distributed contraceptives in birth control clinics, lobbied for their legalization, and urged the medical establishment to develop more effective methods. The birth control movement described contraception as a “right” of women to decide if, when, and how many children to bear (a right that would be echoed in the abortion rights movement) without intervention from the state or religious institutions.

Eugenicists were also advocates of contraception in the first half of the 20th century. Contraception, including permanent sterilization, was heralded as a solution to social problems such as poverty, insanity, and criminality because it would ensure that indigent, mentally ill, and otherwise “undesirable” populations would not reproduce. Thus one aspect of the history of contraception in the United States and worldwide has been its link with eugenic programs. Furthermore, just as the term birth control emphasized an individual's contraceptive choice, population control emphasized contraception as a policy issue for entire populations.

Although the Comstock Law had been overturned in most states by the early to mid-20th century, it was not until the 1965 Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut that the use of contraceptives was legalized throughout the United States. The court decided that couples had the right to privacy and that contraception was a decision that should be left to the individual couple, not the state. The Griswold decision was followed 8 years later by Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States.

[Page 167]Along with the overturning of the Comstock Law, another major development in contraception of the 1960s was the invention and widespread use of the oral hormonal contraceptive known as “the pill.” Indeed, demand for the pill precipitated the Griswold v. Connecticut decision. The pill further cemented the separation between intercourse and procreation because it is highly effective (between 90 and 99 percent), and its timing is separated from the sexual act.

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