A friend of mine tracked down her birth mother and discovered that not only did she live nearby but that she managed a store that we walked by all the time in college. Crazy.

Me too. After I found my biological mother I tried to offer others my advice and tried to point out that these are real people who made a difficult decision many years ago and you have to respect that and not go into it with any kind of agenda or wish-fulfillment fantasy. And I was widely ignored.

I never felt that resentment either, especially after hearing my (and her) story. Typical of the mid-1960s...teen gets pregnant, ultra-religious family, she gets shipped off to the nunnery, gives birth and comes home like nothing ever happened. Unfortunately some folks cannot wrap their head around that as they have…

Looks like a direct copy of the U.K. show, but cheesier/with less genuine heart.

Anything advertised as a “menstrual regulator,” or otherwise promising to hasten a late or irregular period, was almost certainly intended as an abortifacient.

And wasn’t there a whole set of code-words that magazines, doctors, underground abortion providers, and women’s-health activists used to talk about/advertise birth control or abortion services— specificially to get around the Comstock Act? There were certain euphemisms you could say that everyone would grok but which…

I used to be a legal proofreader, and these particular cases against an object or a shipment of objects used to absolutely slay the whole department... US vs. One Hundred Forty-Four Boxes Of Frozen Fish. US vs. $75,000 Cash. US vs. 422 Casks of Wine. I considered it one of the few benefits of the job (because having…

Do you watch “The Knick”? It’s had a couple of great plotlines about reproductive rights in the early 1900's, and they touch upon the STD issue briefly. An upper class lady was given syphilis by her cheating husband, and was still shunned by society. There was just no way to win.

Yeah, there was some study showing that modern women ovulate way more than our grandmothers did, owing to us not being pregnant nearly as often. Personally, I’ll take the extra periods over 8+ kids any day of the week.

It was even worse than that, if I remember. It also went after any information sent about preventing STDs, because of course STDs are a punishment from God for your sinful ways.

I haven't verified it, but I heard that the captain of a ship that smuggled diaphragms into the country did so on the condition that he received one for his wife as payment. This was a man with a good job, and even he couldn't handle the burden of too many children.

I recently read this history of the development of the pill, and the most striking part was the numbers—just how many kids married women might have by the time they turned 30 without access to reliable birth control.

Well, to be fair, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the defendants are a pile of douches, so it works pretty well.

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5083/

There are some here.

“Motherhood in Bondage”
And yes, it’s as sad and terrible as the title suggests. :-/

I wonder if that’s why Bioshock Infinite’s villain is named Comstock. The time period is right and this is the kind of shit that happened in Columbia...

Do you remember the name of that book? It sound depressing, but I’d really like to read it.

I remember reading a book of desperate letters written to Sanger during this period. There were so many, they were divided into chapters based on theme- women who knew others that had access, but wouldn’t share; women whose husbands blamed them for all the children; women who were using abstinence as birth control.…

“United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries”