CHAPTER 3

In his State of the Union address of January 4, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson cautiously announced his plans to promote the use of birth control abroad. "I will seek new ways," he told Congress, "to use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in world population and the growing scarcity in world resources." This statement of support for birth control was not a bold one, but it was the first ever by a sitting president. Johnson knew that by merely alluding to federal financing of contraception, he might anger Catholic voters across the country. And though the president was eager to promote the use of birth control abroad, several states at home had laws against birth control on their books. Johnson's January message suggested it would be a stormy year of controversy and conflict over contraception.

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Human beings began using contraceptives thousands of years before the birth of Christ. Archaeologists have found ancient recipes for contraceptive potions using such ingredients as crocodile dung, honey, and sodium carbonate. In the pre-Christian world, evidence suggests that prostitutes used primitive pessaries (spongelike devices) to block sperm from entering the uterus, and men frequently practiced coitus interruptus. Aristotle and other Greek philosophers recommended a range of procedures to prevent conception or abort an unwanted pregnancy. During the Roman occupation of Palestine in the first and second centuries before Christ, Jewish priests recorded various methods known for sterilizing women.

Nowhere does the Old Testament explicitly say that contraception is immoral. It is not mentioned in any of the long lists of crimes spelled out in the Five Books of Moses. The story of Onan, found in Genesis 38, is traditionally cited as a warning against contraception (it has also been used as an injunction against masturbation and homosexuality), but the story has more to do with a son's defiance of his father than with sexual behavior: Onan's father orders him to have sex with his brother's widow in order to impregnate her, but Onan disobeys by "spilling his seed" on the ground, and is then slain by God. Apart from this one story, the Old Testament is indifferent toward contraception. The sections of the Old Testament that catalogue in precise detail the laws of ritual cleanliness and sexual conduct do not say anything about preventing reproduction.

The New Testament is similarly silent on the subject. Various passages emphasize the importance of virginity, marriage, and love, but contraception is never mentioned. Early Christians acquired the notion that contraception was wrong not from the Bible, but from various sources outside Christianity. Not until St. Augustine in the fifth century was the Church's position on contraception fully formulated. According to Augustine, contraception was unconditionally immoral and illicit. Overcome with guilt about his own lustfulness, Augustine was determined to check the impulses of his fellow Christians by restricting sex to procreation.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian theologians refined and reaffirmed Augustine's ban on birth control. In practice, however, religious authorities did little to enforce this theoretical ban. European peasants were essentially free to experiment with whatever contraceptive techniques they might devise. Some theologians even gave their official blessing to coitus interruptus. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century, when the birthrate in some Christian countries began to decline, that religious leaders and political officials began to worry about the sexual behavior of married couples.

The Enlightenment led to the first treatises actually advocating birth control and family limitation. Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and Francis Place encouraged couples to limit the number of their offspring to ensure the maximum amount of resources for every child. Later in the nineteenth century, Robert Dale Owen and Charles Knowlton wrote detailed marriage manuals to teach couples about coitus interruptus and douching. In 1843, the invention of vulcanized rubber led to the creation of modern condoms. Ten years later, however, the Holy Office of the Inquisition ruled that condoms were unacceptable for Catholics.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a virtual war raged in English-speaking countries between champions and critics of birth control. In America, Charles Knowlton's practical text The Fruits of Phi-losophy: or The Private Companion of Young Married People (...) was censored. Anthony Comstock, a Civil War veteran with a sharp sense of moral duty, launched a crusade to ban birth control devices and put abortionists out of business. At Comstock's urging, Congress passed a bill in 1873 making it illegal to mail material advertising "obscene rubber goods." The law also prohibited the importation of any birth control device. Congress authorized Comstock to guard American morals, and guard them he did. He hounded every manufacturer and salesman of contraceptive devices he could find. Meanwhile, many states, driven by the fear that if Protestants continued to use birth control they would soon be outnumbered by Catholics, passed laws making it illegal to use, sell, or display contraceptives. But birth control advocates were equally committed. In 1878, champions of population control in Great Britain formed the Malthusian League to educate physicians about the benefits of contraception. (The group was named after the English pessimist Thomas Malthus, who predicted that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supply, but the group did not endorse Malthus's anti-welfare views.) In America, starting in the 1910s, contraception crusader Margaret Sanger went door to door to teach poor women about condoms and diaphragms. Between 1900 and 1925 international birth control conferences were held in Paris, Liège, the Hague, Dresden, London, and New York.

Over the course of the twentieth century, modernization and secularization helped destigmatize birth control in America. Challenging the Comstock law in court, physicians gained the right to obtain contraceptives through the mail. The U.S. Army spent millions of dollars to supply soldiers with condoms during World War II. One by one, each of the mainline Protestant denominations declared contraception to be a private matter between husband and wife. Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Federation of America changed its name in 1942 to Planned Parenthood and grew until it had thousands of clinics across the country. But state laws against birth control remained on the books. And in a series of papal proclamations in the '40s and '50s, the Catholic Church reiterated its stance against birth control. No matter how hard groups like Planned Parenthood tried to push legislators toward a secular view of sex, politicians, mindful of Catholic votes, refused to repeal nineteenth-century laws against contraception. (It didn't matter to Catholic leaders that those same laws had originally been enacted in order to maintain a Protestant majority.) Such laws did not actually stop women from using contraceptives - Connecticut, which had one of the most stringent laws in the country, also had one of the lowest birthrates - but through the mid-twentieth century timid legislators refused to repeal them.

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Laws or no laws, the invention of the oral contraceptive in the late 1950s revolutionized public discourse about birth control. Developed in 1957 and licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, the birth control pill - which quickly became known simply as "the pill" - gave women a greater sense of sexual freedom than any contraceptive device that had come before. Just as the availability of penicillin in the 1940s had seemed to separate sex from the danger of venereal disease once and for all, the invention of the birth control pill finally appeared to divorce sex from the danger of unwanted pregnancy. It was not that the condom, the pessary, the diaphragm, and the spermicide, all of which preceded the pill, were ineffective, but the pill, a synthetic estrogen taken once a day, at any time of the day, separated the act of intercourse from the use of birth control. With the pill, contraception became "clean."

To midsixties America, the pill was a revolutionary invention, a medical triumph over human biology. Indeed, the pill medicalized contraception at a time when Americans were increasingly turning to medicine to solve personal and social problems. A technological marvel, the pill appealed to America's sense of progress. "In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire," wrote philosopher Ashley Montagu; others compared it with the invention of the printing press. Montagu theorized that the pill would not only emancipate women and make premarital sex acceptable, it would eliminate the American male's "predatory exploitative attitude toward the female," and allow for the overall "rehumanization" of mankind.

Serious research into a contraceptive in pill form began in 1953 when Katharine Dexter McCormick, who was a former suffragist friend of Margaret Sanger's, and the widow of an heir to the McCormick reaper fortune, gave a major grant to Planned Parenthood to develop an oral contraceptive. The group funded the work of Gregory Pincus, a biologist at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, who was studying the physiology of conception. McCormick wanted Pincus to develop a contraceptive method that women could control. Pincus teamed up with John Rock, a Roman Catholic gynecologist at Harvard Medical School. Together they developed a synthetic steroid tablet which they tested on women in Puerto Rico. Soon thereafter, the Searle pharmaceutical company agreed to market the first oral contraceptive product in the United States under the brand name Enovid.

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Copyright © 2000 by David Allyn

Tags: Birth Control

About the Author

David Allyn has a Ph.D. from Harvard and has taught history at Princeton University. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New York Daily News, and the Journal of American Studies. He has appeared on CNN and MSNBC and has lectured on the sexual revolution at conferences and colleges across the country. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, with his wife and daughter. More