The History of Contraceptives in America

Aug 31, 2022

A PROMISING PLANT

Translated today, the Latin phrase coitus interruptus refers to the ancient art of "pulling out,” but our ancestors had some other pretty freaky ideas when it came to trying to prevent pregnancy. Many early contraceptives were strange, unsafe, and ineffective. However, the most mysterious of them may have been the Silphium plant, discovered in Ancient Rome. The Silphium plant was a giant flowering fennel whose juice was used as a spermicide before or after sex. Birth rates fell in Ancient Rome during Silphium’s heyday, but the plant was so popular that it was driven into extinction, and its efficacy may never be determined. Ironically, Silphium’s legacy lives on through its representation in our universal symbol of love; a ❤️ gets its shape from the primeval plant’s heart-shaped pods.

Silphium was so popular that depictions of it were printed on Roman currency (via numisbids)

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND MODERN-DAY SLAVES

Prior to the nineteenth century, methods of contraception were mostly based on hearsay and hunches, but the industrial revolution brought about some much-needed changes in the quest for effective birth control. Charles Goodyear paved the way for condom sales to take off by patenting the process used to mass produce rubber goods, known as vulcanization. However, "rubbers" back then were far less magnificent back then than the Trojans or Magnums of today. Although the invention of latex in 1920 resulted in a much thinner and more malleable version of rubber, condoms produced prior to then were custom-fit, reusable, and roughly the thickness of a bicycle tire (pictured here🤮).

After the Civil War, America had a big problem: an extreme worker shortage. To cope, legislatures began writing laws to expand the definition of what it meant to be a criminal. Notoriously, the Vagrancy Act of 1866 is one of the crudest, most unjust, pieces of legislation to ever be passed because of how it targeted newly-freed slaves and forced them back into unpaid labor.

“The vagrants were to be returned to their employers, for whom they would work for free, staying on an extra month and wearing balls and chains. If no employer would take them, they would be forced to work on public projects, also for free and still wearing balls and chains. Absent any suitable public projects, vagrants would be confined to jail and be fed only bread and water.”
“The Vagrancy Act of 1866, passed by the General Assembly on January 15, 1866, forced into employment, for a term of up to three months, any person who appeared to be unemployed or homeless.”
-Encyclopedia Virginia

The Comstock Act of 1873 also signifies how U.S. legislatures were grasping at straws to control dissidents. Under the new laws, anyone found possessing "obscene literature or articles of immoral use" was subject to prosecution, and harboring materials such as pornography, suggestive literature, or mere educational material about contraceptives or abortion was punishable by up to 5 years of manual labor.

MARGARET SANGER

Enter Margaret Sanger, the Planned Parenthood pioneer. Sanger was the first to coin the term “birth-control” in 1914, while working as a nurse in New York City. If social media had been around back then, Sanger would have had birth control trending for months. Her ideas resonated with women in society, and birth control activism gained traction quickly. Unsurprisingly, Sanger’s views were met with strong opposition, and she was arrested multiple times throughout her lifetime.

Yet, Sanger remained deeply motivated by her beliefs. She knew allowing women to choose when they wanted to have children was essential to their progress in society. Sanger also believed that universal access to birth control would slow population growth, reduce abortions, and lift people out of poverty. In 1923, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic on the same site that later became the National Center for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Still, it took more than half a century for contraceptives to become federally legal for all women to use in the United States.

In 1933, Sanger intentionally violated Comstock Laws so that she could have her case heard by a federal judge. After importing Japanese contraceptive equipment, her delivery was seized by U.S. customs, and Sanger appeared in court on December 7, 1936. In her case, Augustus Hands ruled in Sanger’s favor, arguing that a physician’s use of contraceptives pertained to the well-being of a patient’s body and, therefore, were not used for "immoral use." Hands cited a clause in the original draft of the 1873 Comstock Act, that was deleted before the final draft of the document, that provided an exemption for physicians. He argued that the drafters left the exemption out "to leave room for future determination." In the case of United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, Sanger’s win effectively legalized birth control.

Percentage of women in the labor force from 1920-1990 (source: Dartmouth College).

“THE PILL”

By the 1950s, scientists knew that they could prevent pregnancy if they could synthesize a drug that mimicked progesterone, the main female reproductive hormone. Progestin, the drug they came up with, prohibits the release of the female sex cell by preventing hormonal levels from returning to their ovulating states. Oral contraceptives artificially increase progesterone levels to trick a woman’s body into thinking that it already has a fertilized egg growing inside of it. Today, “the pill” comes as progestin-only or with artificial estrogen and progesterone both acting as active ingredients.

Even after the first birth control pill was approved for FDA use in 1960, the political fight was not over. Between then and 1972, contraceptives were only approved for married women. During those 12 years, single women would borrow their friends’ wedding rings to wear into clinics and hospitals just so that they could be given the same rights as married women. Without a doubt, the idea of untapped feminine promiscuity scared a lot of people, but feminine promiscuity did not result from the pill; it is what caused its creation.

"Is the Pill regarded as a license for promiscuity? Can its availability to all women of childbearing age lead to sexual anarchy?" -Pearl Buck in U.S. News and World Report (1966).
"Everyone knows what The Pill is. It is a small object — yet its potential effect upon our society many be even more devastating than the nuclear bomb." -Pearl Buck in Reader’s Digest (1968).