In 1942, the organization changes its name to Planned Parenthood Federation of America.ġ941 The National Council of Negro Women becomes the first national women’s organization to officially endorse the practice of contraception.ġ950 While in her 80s, Sanger organizes support for research to create the first birth control pill.ġ953 Biologists John Rock and Gregory Pincus team up to develop the birth control pill, funded by two million dollars from philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick. Constitution.ġ938 Diaphragms, also known as “womb veils,” become a popular method of birth control.ġ939 By this year, nearly 400 community-based and state-sponsored birth control clinics exist throughout the country.ġ939–1942 Several national groups advocating for birth control join together in 1939 to form the Birth Control Federation of America. One Package rules that the federal Comstock law violates the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in U.S. infamously says, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”ġ936 The U.S. To justify the decision, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr. Bell that coercive sterilization does not violate the U.S. Sanger, the New York State Court of Appeals reverses the criminal conviction of Margaret Sanger, ruling that New York’s limitations on the distribution of birth control are unconstitutional because they infringe upon women’s liberties by forcing them to conceive more children than they want.ġ918 African American women of the Women’s Political Association of Harlem hold their first public lecture on birth control.ġ920 Margaret Sanger publicly states that “birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit of preventing the birth of defectives.” Despite disagreeing with some of the ideas of the eugenicists, who were part of the mainstream scientific establishment of the day, Sanger sought legitimacy for her controversial demand for birth control by aligning with them.ġ921 Sanger founds the American Birth Control League, the precursor of Planned Parenthood, at the First American Birth Control Conference in New York City.ġ927 The Supreme Court rules in Buck v. In 1917, she begins publishing the magazine Birth Control Review to educate the public about contraception.ġ918 In the case of People v. Once released, Sanger re-opens her clinic and continues to persevere through more arrests and prosecutions. The next year, a New York court convicts Sanger of “maintaining a public nuisance” by dispensing contraceptive devices and sentences her to jail for 30 days. State officials use these laws disproportionately to target Black women, Native American women and poor women and girls.ġ914 Believing that “enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty,” public health nurse Margaret Sanger coins the term “birth control” and begins her decades-long campaign to make contraceptives legal and available to women in America.ġ916 Margaret Sanger opens the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brownsville, Brooklyn. These laws list the “insane,” the “feeble-minded,” the “dependent,” and the “diseased” as incapable of regulating their own reproductive abilities, therefore justifying government-forced sterilizations. Indiana enacts the nation’s first compulsory sterilization law in 1907 by 1929, thirty states have similar laws. Many states pass similar laws in the following years.ġ907 The United States institutes public policies that give the government the right to sterilize “unwilling and unwitting” people. The law’s chief proponent and namesake Anthony Comstock becomes a special agent for the U.S. Postal Service to mail any obscenity, contraceptives, abortifacients, or sex toys and authorizes the postal service to confiscate birth control sold through the mail. The low pH of the dung may have had a spermicidal effect.ġ619-1870 Black women draw upon African folk remedies to create medicines that are shared and spread among enslaved populations to resist coerced reproduction by white men.ġ855 The first rubber condom is produced.ġ873 Congress passes the Comstock Act, which criminalizes using the U.S. These methods often failed.Īround 3000 BCE Ancient societies, including Crete and Egypt, begin developing condoms made from animal and fish bladders or intestines and linen sheaths.Īround 1850 BCE Egypt develops one of the first spermicides by combining crocodile dung and fermented dough. Prior to reliable modern methods of birth control, people relied on withdrawal or periodic abstinence. These efforts, however, have often been constrained by governments, religious institutions, medical professionals and others seeking to control reproduction by blocking access to contraception and/or coercively imposing it on certain populations. People have long tried many methods to prevent pregnancy.
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