The History of Birth Control

The Comstock law was enacted in 1873 by Anthony Comstock. This law censored the mailing of any materials seen as lewd, indecent, filthy, or obscene. This not only included many authors works that we hold dearly today (Chaucer, Boccaccio, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and James Joyce) but also anything that related to birth control or abortion. Many women raised up against oppression and social standards to try to put an end to the Comstock Laws that they saw unfair and unfit during the industrial revolution.

Many social events led to the Comstock Laws that allowed Anthony Comstock to persuade the legislation easily (in under an hour) into his belief that a perfect society contained censorship. One of the main events would be that abortion was banned by legislation in 1860 unless it was necessary to save the life of a woman and shortly after in 1869 Pope Pius IX declared that all abortion was murder. However, in 1870 New York Times estimated that there was an estimated number of 200 full-time abortionists working in America at the time-and they would continue to give abortions even if the law stated otherwise.
The religious, social moralists now had a soap box to ban sex for pleasure and spout off their idea that sex should only be used for childbearing causes. This caused passionate and conservative feminists to speak out against Roosevelt and his anti-birth control beliefs. In return, people began associating mobs of angry feminist women against a females primary social duty--motherhood. In a gender behavior controlled society Birth Control was soon to spark a revolution and a division in America.