Birth Control Education and Censorship
Birth control education has a long and complex history, characterized by varying degrees of accessibility and censorship. Historical information about contraception was primarily shared through informal means, often leading to inaccuracies. In the 19th century, literacy and advocacy for women's rights paved the way for more reliable contraceptive information, as figures like Annie Besant and Robert Dale Owen published works promoting family planning. However, this increased availability prompted backlash, particularly in the United States, where opponents, including the antivice crusader Anthony Comstock, enacted laws that criminalized the distribution of contraceptive information.
Despite these challenges, advocates like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger emerged in the early 20th century, pushing for legal reforms and greater acceptance of birth control. Over time, societal attitudes shifted, resulting in broader support from religious groups and the medical community by the 1930s. However, access to birth control remained uneven globally, with significant disparities in developing countries. In recent years, debates over birth control education have continued, especially in the context of U.S. schools and legislation. The intersection of legal rulings, such as those surrounding the Affordable Care Act and the implications of the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, raise ongoing concerns about the future of birth control access and education.
Birth Control Education and Censorship
Definition: The teaching of practical methods for preventing pregnancy
Significance: In the nineteenth century contraceptive information was classified as obscene; it took the efforts of organized birth control movements in the twentieth century to legalize and spread birth control information. However, barriers to birth control education and access persisted into the twenty-first century.
Information on birth control, along with birth control itself, has been available in various forms since the beginning of history. Transmitted by word of mouth, it has been difficult to censor; however, information spread by word of mouth is often inaccurate and unreliable. Contraception was condemned by different religions as sinful, and information about it was spread informally and was often ineffective. The nineteenth century saw a rise in literacy, scientific knowledge, and advocacy of women's rights and other issues related to birth control. As a result, mass publication in Western nations made reliable contraceptive advice more readily available to ordinary people.
The Nineteenth Century
Freethinkers and other radicals were the first to spread contraceptive information. In 1823 Francis Place, a British political activist, distributed instructive handbills to members of the working class. In the United States, Robert Dale Owen, a utopian freethinker, published Moral Physiology in 1831; Charles Knowlton, a Massachusetts physician, published Fruits of Philosophy a year later. Both books argued for limiting family size and provided practical instructions for family planning. Knowlton was indicted several times for obscenity and twice found guilty during the early 1830s.
Despite the scandals following publication of these books, birth control proved a popular subject. Not only were self-help books on contraception and physiology available, but the mid-century saw an explosion of advertisements for contraceptive devices, techniques, and information. Many products were fraudulent and the techniques bizarre and sometimes dangerous; others honestly represented the latest advances in technology. In addition lecturers in physiology traveled giving speeches on contraceptive practice. One speaker, Frederick Hollick, was arrested twice during the 1840s, once for publication of The Origins of Life (1845) and again for his birth control lectures.
Censorship During the 1870s
The increased availability of contraceptive information drew a counterattack, especially in the United States. During the 1870s there was increasing concern over declining birthrates among native-born, white, middle-class Americans, new patterns of immigration, and the easy availability of sexually explicit materials. Opponents linked contraceptives to the rising numbers of immigrants and nonwhite Americans. Others feared the impact that sexual intercourse without pregnancy might have on the moral behavior of women.
In the United States, antivice crusader Anthony Comstock pushed through an 1873 federal law that criminalized the distribution of contraceptive information and ruthlessly pursued violators. Among his victims was Edward Bliss Foote, a civil libertarian and physician who had made his living selling contraceptive information and devices before 1873. Foote was arrested in 1876 for violating the Comstock Act of 1873 by mailing contraceptive advice. Despite his medical credentials, Foote was convicted and fined three thousand dollars. After this case, many physicians retreated from providing birth control education, leaving the shrinking field to nonprofessional vendors. Despite the risk of arrest, mail-order businesses and drug stores continued to sell condoms, diaphragms, chemical solutions, and other goods. Newspaper and magazine advertisements for such products were censored, but advertisers often got away with disguising contraceptives as “feminine hygiene” products.
American censorship of birth control became formalized in law. European censorship more often took the form of occasional prosecutions for obscenity based on the nature of the information or the audience intended. In Great Britain, for example, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh were convicted for reprinting Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy in 1877. Their trial was well publicized and stimulated the foundation of the Malthusian League, the first organization dedicated to promoting contraception. In 1916 socialist Guy Aldred was prosecuted for selling a British version of Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation pamphlet aimed at a working-class audience. Two years later, Marie Stopes’s Married Love , designed for middle-class readers, went unprosecuted. In other areas of Europe, the Netherlands and Germany in particular, governments paid little heed to contraception and physicians developed new contraceptive devices.
In Britain and the United States physicians were often among the most vocal opponents of birth control education. Insistent on professionalizing medicine, doctors launched campaigns warning of the physical dangers of contraception and supported efforts to criminalize it. Doctors often denied women’s requests for birth control education because the idea offended their notions of women’s dependency and passive sexuality. Although many middle- and upper-class women could persuade doctors to help them, among the working class, access to reliable contraceptive information became more difficult, although declining birthrates among the middle class, not the poor, were the source of societal fears about birth control.
Efforts to Repeal Censorship
By the mid-1910s feminist leaders Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger began challenging birth control prohibitions. Goldman spoke on birth control from 1910-1917, distributing a pamphlet titled Why and How the Poor Should Not Have Many Children . Before she was deported for her radicalism in 1917, she was arrested in 1916 and briefly jailed for distributing contraceptive information. Sanger, a practical nurse, became the leading birth control advocate in the United States. She organized legal challenges to the Comstock Act in 1914, 1916, 1917, and 1936 that resulted in the exemption of physicians from prosecution for importing and distributing contraceptives.
In the years following World War I, organized birth control leagues were founded in Europe and America. These organizations shared information and techniques at conferences and by published reports. During the 1930s opposition to birth control education generally declined. In 1937 the American Medical Association ended its long opposition to the practice. By then, too, most religious groups supported birth control. In 1930, for example, the British Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops endorsed birth control, and the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America followed suit in 1931. The Roman Catholic church, however, refused to endorse birth control; in 1930 Pope Pius XI reaffirmed his opposition.
While birth control was becoming more readily available in most countries by the 1930s, in Germany it was repressed. In 1933 Adolf Hitler’s new National Socialist government closed down birth control leagues and arrested their leaders because the Nazi Party wanted German women to have high birthrates. In 1941 Germany made it illegal to import, produce, or sell birth control devices (except condoms); by 1943 offenses were punishable by death. Germany did not legalize birth control again until after the end of World War II in 1945.
After World War II increased numbers of birth control clinics and widespread discussion of sex helped spread birth control information. A series of Supreme Court decisions broadened legal use of contraceptives in the United States. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) the U.S. Supreme Court held that use of birth control techniques by married couples was not obscene. In 1971 Congress repealed most of the provisions of the Comstock Law. In 1972 the Supreme Court’s Eisenstadt v. Baird decision held that unmarried couples had the same right to use contraceptives as married couples. With its Carey v. Population Services International decision in 1977, the Supreme Court upheld the rights of lay providers to supply contraceptive education to minors and legalized birth control advertisement. Despite the progress made in terms of global birth control access, 225 million women in developing countries were unable to obtain it in 2016, according to the Family Planning 2020 report from that year.
In addition to these barriers faced by many in developing countries, debates over birth control education and access to birth control persisted in the US during the first decades of the twenty-first century. The subject of sex education in schools proved particularly contentious, with some schools in the US opting for abstinence-based curricula, which typically emphasized abstaining from sex entirely and did not include meaningful information about birth control use. Legal challenges to the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), often referred to as Obamacare, throughout the 2010s allowed some private employers to opt out of covering birth control for employees on company health insurance plans.
Other political and legal developments in the US in the early 2020s also raised concerns of an eventual push to limit adults' access to birth control. In 2022 the US Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, overturning its 1972 decision in Roe v. Wade, which had established a nationwide right to abortion. The Court rejected its earlier protection of abortion rights and argued that the Constitution, namely the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, did not guarantee a right to abortion or other "unwritten" rights. This logic had the potential for far-reaching consequences; some felt that the same argument could be used to undermine the rights established in Griswold and other cases related to birth control.
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