Birth Control

Bradlaugh, Charles (1833-1891) (birth control)

A son of a solicitor’s clerk, Charles Bradlaugh attended schools in London until he was eleven, when he went to work in his father’s office. After that he had a mixture of jobs but spent most of his spare time attending open air meetings in London parks listening to the open discussion of social, political, […]

Cadbury, George (1907-1995) and Barbara (1910- ) (birth control)

George and Barbara Cadbury were prominent Canadian birth control advocates. Barbara Cad-bury was a founder of the Planned Parenthood Association of Toronto in 1961. In her capacity as secretary, she wrote a letter to the minister of justice in December 1963 outlining the association’s support for decriminalizing birth control services. George Cadbury was the executive […]

Brownsville Birth Control Clinic

Margaret Sanger was intensely competitive and she much resented that while she had been abroad (to avoid prosecution) Mary Ware Dennett had established the first national birth control group, the National Birth Control League. After the charges for which she had fled the country had been dropped on February 18, 1916, Sanger moved to resume […]

Breast-feeding as a Method of Birth Control

Because breast-feeding delays the onset of menstruation after pregnancy, a phenomenon that is easily observed, it has often been regarded as a form of birth control. It is, however, only a relatively short-term one. Modern studies in developing countries show that mothers who breastfeed for an extended period do not begin menstruating until an average […]

Canon Law and Contraception (birth control)

Although Jesus of Nazareth referred only rarely to moral problems posed by sexual behavior of any kind and is not known to have said anything at all about the control of reproduction, his followers have not been nearly so reticent on these matters. Saint Augustine (354-430), whose views on sexual behavior have profoundly influenced, and […]

Canon Law and Abortion (birth control)

The Christian church from the outset condemned abortion. Christianity’s earliest disciplinary rule book, the Didache (probably written for a Syrian Christian community, perhaps as early as 60 c.e., in which case it would antedate the surviving Gospel texts) specifically forbade Christians to procure the abortion of a fetus. Other early collections of rules for Christians […]

Canada and Birth Control

Canada’s first Criminal Code was enacted by Parliament in 1892. It was a federal statute that established as criminal acts offenses against the person, offenses against property, and offenses involving currency and conspiracies. From its earliest formulation within the 1892 Criminal Code, as Section 179, conception prevention came under the heading of “Offences Against Morality.” […]

Cervical Rings (birth control)

Cervical rings, developed in the last decade of the twentieth century, are another method of distributing hormones into the female reproductive system by using the same principle as that used by the pills, the injections, and the implants. Ring diameters ranges from 50 to 75 mm; the cross-sectional diameters, from 5 to 9 mm. There […]

Cervical Cap (birth control)

Barrier methods of contraception rely on placing some kind of obstacle in the vagina to prevent the passage of sperm into the uterus. Some, such as the diaphragm, covered the cervix, whereas the cervical cap was designed to fit only over the cervix and not block the vaginal canal as the diaphragm did. The problem […]

Catholic Church (American) and Birth Control

Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement ran into repeated opposition with the Catholic Church, particularly in New York City. In 1921 when Sanger organized the first National Birth Control Conference in New York City, the city police closed the entrance of the auditorium and tried to evict the audience that had gathered to hear […]

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