Anne Higgins died of tuberculosis when she was about 50 years old, and her daughter Margaret was in her late teens. Her health had deteriorated as a result of 11 births and 7 miscarriages. She saw many women face unwanted pregnancies and the effects of botched abortions. Through her own experience and that of the patients she saw, she became convinced that the inability to control family size kept women in a cycle of poverty.
As she devoted more and more of her time to the advocation of birth control, Margaret began writing a newspaper column to spread information she felt women needed—and deserved—to know about their own reproductive choices.
Margaret fled to England until the charges were dropped, returning to the U. Soon after the opening, Margaret was charged again and arrested for breaking the Comstock laws. The risks were enormous. Pincus settled on a physician named John Rock, a gynecologist respected by his peers and adored by his patients.
Rock looked like a family physician from central casting in Hollywood: tall, slender, and silver-haired, with a gentle smile and a calm, deliberate manner. Even his name connoted strength, solidity, and reliability. There is no mention of contraception in the Bible, Old Testament or New, nor did the term enter the vocabulary of Catholic moral theology until the second half of the twentieth century.
Before then, the most relevant term used by theologians was onanisma , from the biblical story of Onan Genesis —10 , which was described as masturbation or sexual intercourse performed without the intention of reproduction.
Sex was only for procreation, the Christian church declared, which made onanisma a sin. The human reproductive system was poorly understood even in the early years of the twentieth century. The pope did, however, offer the faithful an important loophole: A married couple would not be sinning, he said, if the husband and wife knew that natural reasons prevented them from having children.
After scientists finally got it right, a Chicago family doctor named Leo J. Latz wrote an instruction manual that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. There was more than pleasure on the line.
Women all over the world were desperate to control family size or better time the arrival of children—for the sake of their health and the welfare of their other children.
In the s, birth rates for all American families fell to a low of 2. Priests, alarmed by the trend, took to their pulpits to attack birth control, but their sermons did little good. For the first time, many Catholics began compartmentalizing their beliefs. Sex became something private and apart from religion. It was the rumbling before a seismic shift. John Rock had already gained a small measure of fame as the Catholic doctor who dared defy his church: He wanted young couples to talk about sex and babies before they married.
He wanted them to understand that sex was neither shameful nor obscene. He wanted society to provide safe and effective means of birth control, and he wanted married couples to have the right to use them. For all of this, Monsignor Francis W. It was no wonder Pincus liked him. When Rock treated women for infertility, he would begin by taking a medical history and providing a complete physical exam.
Rock was unusual among fertility specialists at the time because he also asked husbands to have their semen tested. He was also unusual—if not unique—in that he operated a rhythm clinic down the hall from his infertility clinic to teach women how to better time their sexual activity to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Between the women seeking birth control and those patients who were trying to overcome infertility, Rock came to understand not only human reproduction but also a good deal about human relations.
It was there that Sanger saw her personal tragedy writ large in the lives of poor, immigrant women. Lacking effective contraceptives, many women, when faced with another unwanted pregnancy, resorted to five-dollar back-alley abortions.
It was after these botched abortions that Sanger was usually called in to care for the women. After experiencing many women's trauma and suffering, Sanger began to shift her attention from nursing to the need for better contraceptives. Anger Turns to Action Sanger began to devote more and more of her time to her mission.
In she coined the term "birth control" and soon began to provide women with information and contraceptives. Indicted in for sending diaphragms through the mail and arrested in for opening the first birth control clinic in the country, Sanger would not be deterred.
In she founded the American Birth Control League, the precursor to the Planned Parenthood Federation, and spent her next three decades campaigning to bring safe and effective birth control into the American mainstream. Still More to Do But by the s, although she had won many legal victories, Sanger was far from content. After 40 years of fighting to help women control their fertility, Sanger was extremely frustrated with the limited birth control options available to women.
Since the invention of the diaphragm in Europe and the introduction of the first full-length rubber condom in the U. Sanger had championed the diaphragm, but after promoting it for decades, she knew it was still the least popular birth control method in America.
The diaphragm was highly effective, but it was expensive, awkward -- and most women were too embarrassed to use it. Worried about Population Growth But Sanger, now in her seventies and in poor health, was not ready to give up. She had been dreaming of a "magic pill" for contraception since She was no longer just concerned about women suffering from unwanted pregnancies. Now, a firm believer in the theory of population control, she was also worried about the potential toll of unchecked population growth on the world's limited natural resources.
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