must read

[anne_jumps]

The History of Birth Control

I did a report on Margaret Sanger at some point but I honestly can't remember whether it was college or high school o_o

Comments

[anne_jumps]

Yeah, it's very easy to take it for granted. Not that I'm saying that's what you're doing, but hey, it just is easy! It's just hard to imagine living in a world where there just aren't the same options.

[drownedinink]

I know they were focusing on recent developments, but they left out my own favorite part about the history of birth control. There were nuns and monks, including the famous twelfth century nun Hildegard of Birgen, who included recipes for contraceptive potions and what they called "menstrual regulators." Even though the lists were extremely detailed, they often carried the excuse that the recipes were included only so women wouldn't take them "accidentally" (although a couple were expressly written for humanitarian reasons; one list of contraceptive/miscarriage-inducing recipes was called "A Treasury for the Poor.") (And on a side note, while the Catholic Church was always weary at best about contraception, in the Middle Ages they were usually far more accepting women who used birth control or induced miscarriages because of poverty. Funny how the medieval Church can seem more "liberal" than its modern incarnation

[anne_jumps]

ancient and medieval methods of birth control were actually extremely effective and that the knowledge became discredited with the rise of the modern, male-dominated medical establishment

Interesting. Do you have any specific recs?

[drownedinink]

The items about contraception and monks I mainly got from James Bundrage's Law, Sex, and Society in Medieval Europe and Ruth Karras's Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Do Unto Others. The former I'd recommend if you want to just read on one specific topic, but not for much else. Karras' book is better for casual reading, although she has some theory stuff that would bore even some professional historians, much less lay readers.

As for books just on the history of birth control...to be honest, I don't know of that many good ones. Angus McLaren's A History of Contraception is pretty good, just not all that in-depth.

[lexically]

Whenever I hear about Margaret Sanger all I can think of is the American eugenics movement in the 30s :(

[anne_jumps]

Right, well, at the time a lot of people thought it was the right thing to do. It's unfortunate that the eugenics movement is now used by the right to attempt to discredit everything she did (as though they're against eugenics). Very disingenuous.

I still absolutely support what she did other than that aspect, which I think was a side issue that over time came to stand apart.
I remember in the beginning of a book about her she said she was inspired by the fact that her mother kept getting pregnant and having babies and she begged and pleaded to stop having to go through it, because she wasn't very hardy, but her husband just ignored her wishes and eventually her pregnancies killed her because she had no other choice.