A History of the Birth Control Movement in America

A History of the Birth Control Movement in America

Author: Peter C. Engelman

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2011-04-19

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0313365105

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This narrative history of one of the most far-reaching social movements in the 20th century shows how it defied the law and made the use of contraception an acceptable social practice—and a necessary component of modern healthcare. A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger's campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history. The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement's thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights.


Contraception

Contraception

Author: Donna J. Drucker

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0262538423

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The development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the late nineteenth century to the present, viewed from the perspective of reproductive justice. The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present. Drucker approaches the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily. Drucker describes contraceptive methods available before the pill, including the diaphragm (dispensed at the Jacobs clinic) and condom, spermicidal jellies, and periodic abstinences. She looks at the development and dissemination of the pill and its chemical descendants; describes technological developments in such non-hormonal contraceptives as the cervical cap and timing methods (including the “rhythm method” favored by the Roman Catholic church); and explains the concept of reproductive justice. Finally, Drucker considers the future of contraception—the adaptations of existing methods, new forms of distribution, and ongoing efforts needed to support contraceptive access worldwide.


Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance

Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance

Author: John M. Riddle

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780674168763

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This text traces the history of contraception and abortifacients from ancient Egypt to the 17th century, and discusses the scientific merit of the ancient remedies and why this knowledge about fertility control was gradually lost over the course of the Middle Ages.


Eve’s Herbs

Eve’s Herbs

Author: John M. Riddle

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1999-04-15

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0674266676

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In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John M. Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve’s Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times? Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed “secret knowledge” to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception. Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as “witchcraft” in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by “Eve’s herbs” has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.


The Morning After

The Morning After

Author: Heather Munro Prescott

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2011-09-15

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 0813552176

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Since 2006, when the “morning-after pill” Plan B was first sold over the counter, sales of emergency contraceptives have soared, becoming an $80-million industry in the United States and throughout the Western world. But emergency contraception is nothing new. It has a long and often contentious history as the subject of clashes not only between medical researchers and religious groups, but also between different factions of feminist health advocates. The Morning After tells the story of emergency contraception in America from the 1960s to the present day and, more importantly, it tells the story of the women who have used it. Side-stepping simplistic readings of these women as either radical feminist trailblazers or guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical industry, medical historian Heather Munro Prescott offers a portrait of how ordinary women participated in the development and popularization of emergency contraception, bringing a groundbreaking technology into the mainstream with the potential to alter radically reproductive health practices.


Speroff & Darney’s Clinical Guide to Contraception

Speroff & Darney’s Clinical Guide to Contraception

Author: Jeffrey Jensen

Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 1975107292

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Practical, authoritative, and up-to-date,Speroff & Darney’s Clinical Guide to Contraception, 6th Edition, provides concise coverage of all of today’s available contraceptive options. Under the leadership of new editors Jeffrey T. Jensen, MD, MPH, and Mitchell Creinin, MD, this well-regarded clinical reference remains a thorough, evidence-based, and readable resource for OB/GYNs, family planning specialists, primary care providers, and other healthcare providers.


Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use

Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use

Author:

Publisher: World Health Organization

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 9241563885

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Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use reviews the medical eligibility criteria for use of contraception, offering guidance on the safety and use of different methods for women and men with specific characteristics or known medical conditions. The recommendations are based on systematic reviews of available clinical and epidemiological research. It is a companion guideline to Selected Practice Recommendations for Contraceptive Use. Together, these documents are intended to be used by policy-makers, program managers, and the scientific community to support national programs in the preparation of service delivery guidelines. The fourth edition of this useful resource supersedes previous editions, and has been fully updated and expanded. It includes over 86 new recommendations and 165 updates to recommendations in the previous edition. Guidance for populations with special needs is now provided, and a new annex details evidence on drug interactions from concomitant use of antiretroviral therapies and hormonal contraceptives. To assist users familiar with the third edition, new and updated recommendations are highlighted. Everyone involved in providing family planning services and contraception should have the fourth edition of Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use at hand.


The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

Author: Jonathan Eig

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2014-10-13

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0393245942

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A Chicago Tribune "Best Books of 2014" • A Slate "Best Books 2014: Staff Picks" • A St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Best Books of 2014" The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid. Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.


Contraception for the Medically Challenging Patient

Contraception for the Medically Challenging Patient

Author: Rebecca H. Allen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-10-14

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 9781493912346

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Women with chronic medical problems are at higher risk for complications during pregnancy and therefore, they are especially in need of appropriate preconception and contraception care. Furthermore, many women with chronic medical problems do not obtain adequate preconception and contraception care. Despite published guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is a substantial gap in medical practice regarding the use of contraception in women with co-existing medical problems. Contraception for the Medically Challenging Patient fills the gap that currently exists in the knowledge of correct contraceptive prescribing practice and shows that inappropriate contraindications can easily become a barrier to effective contraception use among women. Chapters highlight obsolete views about appropriate candidates for contraception and address the complex contraceptive needs of today's medically challenging patients with HIV/AIDS, uterine fibroids or cardiac, neurologic or thyroid disease. The book gives attention to recommendations on the use of contraception in women with medical problems such as diabetes, obesity, epilepsy, and lupus, among others and provides comprehensive information regarding the effects that certain drugs may have on contraceptive hormone levels. While national guidelines do exist for contraceptive eligibility, this book discusses in more detail the evidence behind the guideline recommendations and the nuances that clinicians confront in daily practice.