“Birth control” was an early-twentieth-century slogan, but it has become the generic for all forms of control of reproduction. Although there are many types of birth control it’s just as bad as abortion. With the spread of agriculture and the economic advantages of large families, religious and in some cases secular law increasingly restricted birth control, with the result that there appears to have been an increase in reliance on abortion while contraceptive technology and use declined. Both practices were legal in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century.

Starting in the 1830’s, a state-by-state drive to prohibit abortion developed and was largely successful by 1880. It was spurred by a backlash against the women’s rights movement that reflected anxieties about women deserting their conventional position as mothers, and specializing physicians eager to restrict their competition from “irregular” practitioners, many of them offering abortion services. Then in 1873 all birth control information

Shorlty after World War I the birth-control mass movement subsided because of the conservative mood that followed the war. The leader of the main national birth-control organization, Margaret Sanger, shifted political strategies, downplaying the earlier association of reproductive control with women’s right and seeking instead a compromise: legalizing contraception at physicians’ discretion. Birth-control leaders also emphasize the selective breeding arguments popular for several decades. However, building on racist fears of high immigrant and black birthrates built support for the legalization of contraception. The adoption of statutes providing for forcible sterilization of the feeble-minded, “degenerates and some other groups by many states was also part of this redefinition of the function of birth control. This compromise was the basis for significant hostility to birth control among many twentieth-century African-Americans.

The World War II period produced two new birth-control movements: Planned Parenthood and population control. The Planned Parenthood renewed the campaign for the legalization and promotion of contraception, arguing primarily that birth control promoted family stability. Unlike the pro-family backlash of the race suicide alarm, these family planning advocates asserted that marital adjustments must rest on a permissive attitude toward sex without fear of contraception. Planned Parenthood, unlike the voluntary motherhood movement, endorsed unlimited marital sex and did not raise issues of women’s sexual exploitation. In its international aspects, it argued a renewed neo-Malthusianism: it advo

Some topics in this essay:
Act Nevertheless, Planned Parenthood, , Free Love, Margaret Sanger, World War, birth control, Roosevelt Race, War II, population control, voluntary motherhood, women’s rights, planned parenthood, women’s rights advocates, sex fear, women’s sexual, nineteenth century, race suicide, family planning,