[Peace-discuss] what does contraceptive history tell us?

[Susan Davis]

   Walking back from lunch I was thinking about our interesting discussion 
of EC and recalling some of the history reading I've been doing.  Not long 
ago in the US, say 70 yrs or so ago, you could be jailed for dispensing 
contraceptive information.  It was considered subversive, immoral and 
improper, and in some states it was illegal even for doctors to dispense 
info about contraception to their female patients, including even married 
women. Earlier in the century, diaphragms had to be smuggled from Europe, 
where they were in wide use.  Many of the illegal under the counter 
nostrums (like doucheing powders and fake contraceptive creams) could cause 
infection, septic abortion, sterility or all three.  And many of the 
treatments for venereal diseases were so excruciating that men and women 
avoided them.  The people hurt worst by this were poor and immigrant women, 
who had least access to health care and information.  They were also the 
ones who begged most eloquently for the right to information, technologies 
and reproductive freedom -- for themselves and their families.  none of 
this is a secret -- it's well documented in histories of birth control 
technologies and the birth control movement, and well-noted in the 
autobiographies of women radicals of the period.

What does contraceptive history tell us?  That there never has been a time 
when most women wanted LESS contraceptive information and technology than 
they had.

Why does the debate over whether or not emergency contraception should be 
easily and cheaply available remind me so much of the horrors of the early 
20th century, when my own great-grandmother died of a septic abortion after 
she was widowed? (She had already had three children, two of whom lived to 
grow up orphans.)

An enormous, uneven and partial change has been worked in my life time and 
a little longer: it's become easier, though not easy, for women to separate 
out sex from reproduction and marriage.  The notion that decisions about 
reproduction are largely the moral property of women has been strengthened. 
And as a result, there's a great deal more room for young women to consider 
that they have a choice whether to have sex or not --- and that that choice 
can be a positive one.   Who wants to go backwards from there?  No matter 
how far we have to go forward to a better society, and no matter what that 
society looks like to each of us,  going backwards toward a closer tie 
between reproduction and coercion, or a closer tie between sex and fear is 
not going to get us there.   I'm all for making alliances, and reaching out 
to and working others with different and deeply held views, but I'm not 
giving up on those principles.

Susan