What to Know About the Surprising Modern History of Contraception

When the birth control pill hit its 50th anniversary of its 1960 FDA approval, TIME commemorated its influence on the world as having “rearranged the furniture of human relations.” But as influential as the pill was and continues to be, it’s only one small slice of the enormous influence contraception has had on modern history. Few people know that as well as Donna Drucker, a historian who is currently writing a book about its history. As it turns out, that history is just as complex as you probably think, but in ways that may still surprise you. Drucker says she started studying contraception in a roundabout way: after the 2014 release of her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge, she saw that there was a missing element in the story of the famous sex researcher. “I realized how little attention Kinsey paid to contraception in the role of particularly women’s pleasure and general satisfaction,” she says. “Looking back, I thought he’d really underplayed the role of safe contraception in women’s decisions to have heterosexual sex or not.” For World Contraception Day on Wednesday, Drucker talked to TIME about contraception’s complicated past. TIME: Where would you place the beginning of the modern history of contraception? DRUCKER: I would place it at the first clinic where a woman could get a diaphragm on her own from a female doctor. That was in Amsterdam in 1882 and t...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime onetime Sex/Relationships Source Type: news