Birth Control and Abortion in the Middle Ages

Birth control and abortion did take place in the Middle Ages and, like today, there were many medical and ethical issues that medieval people had to contend with.

Feb 18, 2024
Medievalists.net

In the Middle Ages you will find many opinions about what should or shouldn’t be done when it came to preventing pregnancies. However, the medieval period might be unique in that it is perhaps the only time when you can read the same author in one work condemning the use of birth control and in another giving directions on how to use it.

Religious values held the most important influence on the use of birth control, before and after one conceives. Taking their cue from the Biblical commandment to “Be fruitful, and multiply,” medieval Christianity saw the sole purpose of sex as a means to conceive children. Therefore, the idea that one could use birth control to stop conception was usually harshly condemned (and often equated as being the same as abortion). One ninth-century text, explains, “a woman who has taken a magic potion, however many times she would otherwise have become pregnant and given birth, must recognize herself to be guilty of homicide.”

Continued: https://www.medievalists.net/2024/02/birth-control-abortion-middle-ages/


Histories That Both Diverge and Converge: Birth Control in India and Canada

The sexual health markets emerged in response to the demand for birth control, however, they did not deliver in terms of quality or efficacy of product, even less so, towards women’s wellbeing.

Urvi Desai
April 1, 2022

On a sticky February afternoon in 1936,
Margaret Sanger, an American birth control advocate, attended the first
All-India Population Conference held at the famous Cowasjee Jehangir Hall in
Bombay (present-day Mumbai). The conference was attended by the wealthy of
Bombay society, the who’s who in the field, as well as doctors, advocates,
government officials, and more. At around the same time, family planning
societies began to emerge in India. These societies promoted birth control and
advised women who visited their centres about possible birth control
techniques. Varied as the organisations were, they shared the common goal of
insisting that poor women use birth control products to control reproduction.

Continued: https://thewire.in/history/histories-that-both-diverge-and-converge-birth-control-in-india-and-canada


India – A Historian and Her Archives

As a historian, my experience in the archives has been fascinating, confusing and illuminating, often all together. A Historian and Her Archives

Urvi Desai
15/MAR/2022

“Excuse me, sir,” I asked, trying to get the attention of the staff member at the Maharashtra State Archives, a public archive located in the heart of South Bombay. I had just spent several moments pacing up and down the dark corridors stacked with piles and piles of cloth-bound files and was making no headway in my search. I continued despite the silence in response, “Could you please direct me to the section with the Times of India newspapers from the 1930s onwards?” I waited in anticipation.

“Tumi kaun?” he finally responded, peering from behind a shelf. This meant, “Who are you?” in Marathi. Switching quickly from English to Marathi, I introduced myself as a PhD student with McGill University working on the history of birth control in India.

Continued: https://thewire.in/history/a-historian-and-her-archives


USA – Pamela Lowry, who advocated for abortion rights before Roe v. Wade, dies at 77

By Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff
November 23, 2021

A month before turning 21 in 1965, Pamela Lowry began working in Planned Parenthood’s Boston offices, helping women at a time when most had to leave the United States for a legal abortion, and many illegal abortions were dangerous or fatal.

Nine years later, she testified before a US Senate subcommittee and recalled the awful choices women faced before the US Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 made abortion legal across the country.

Continued: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/23/metro/pamela-lowry-who-advocated-abortion-rights-before-roe-v-wade-dies-77/


Abortion and Contraception in the Middle Ages

Both were far more common than you might think

By Roland Betancourt
on December 11, 2020

Today, conversations around abortion in modern Christianity tend to take as a given the longstanding moral, religious and legal prohibition of the practice. Stereotypes of medical knowledge in the ancient and medieval worlds sustain the misguided notion that abortive and contraceptive pharmaceuticals and surgeries could not have existed in the premodern past.

This could not be further from the truth.

Continued: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/abortion-and-contraception-in-the-middle-ages/


Contraceptive Knowledge in the Mid-19th-Century United States

Contraceptive Knowledge in the Mid-19th-Century United States

December 5, 2019

Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Donna J. Drucker, MLS, PhD, Senior Advisor, English as the Language of Instruction at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Here, Dr. Drucker explores the changing availability of knowledge about contraception.

What do pennyroyal, fish skins, horse riding, and ergot of rye have in common? They are all contraceptive methods that have been used for centuries. In preliterate societies, information on regulating pregnancy was likely passed down orally from one generation of women to the next as they helped each other with pregnancies, births, and child spacing. In the mid-nineteenth-century US, however, more and more women were literate and information was more securely captured in print. Examining three mid-nineteenth century medical guides, available online and searchable in the NLM Digital Collections, shows the range of information available to those who could access and read books.

Continued: https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2019/12/05/contraceptive-knowledge-in-the-mid-19th-century-united-states/


After a rocky start, the IUD is now celebrating its 50th birthday

After a rocky start, the IUD is now celebrating its 50th birthday
A Likhaan NGO health worker shows an Intrauterine family planning device to housewives at a reproductive health

Written by Katherine Ellen Foley
January 27, 2018

Until relatively recently, scientists didn’t really understand contraception.

The earliest efforts on record to prevent unwanted pregnancy, from ancient Egypt, were to simply clog the uterus—rocks seemed to work well enough in animals like cows and camels (although the logistics of inserting those are a little fuzzy). For obvious reasons, that was not a suitable option for humans.

Continued: https://qz.com/1189274/after-a-rocky-start-the-iud-is-now-celebrating-its-50th-birthday/