The “day after” pill on a Portland, Oregon pharmacy shelf in 2020
8 June 2026
Birth control is a generic term for a variety of methods to promote family planning and prevent unwanted pregnancies. While various contraceptive practices have been in place for centuries (cf. condom), the term birth control in its current sense only dates to the opening decades of the twentieth century.
The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation of the term from a 13 November 1878 letter to Charles Darwin:
It is the final outcome of Human Evolution in the order of forces governing race propagation. It is necessarily evolved in the mind by the interaction of reason and sympathy, and its development proceeds on the fact of artificial birth-control, unopposed to the force of sexual passion which otherwise would, with the weaker individuals, most certainly be too powerful to permit its action.
But the context here is that of laws to prevent the “weaker” from marrying, not about methods of contraception. The “artificial” refers to legislative action, as opposed to the natural forces of sexual selection. The examples of the weaker mentioned in the letter are those suffering from tuberculosis, mental illness, and epilepsy. So while this use might fall under a capacious definition of the term, it is not a reference to modern contraception (cf. the Pill). And “race propagation” here is in the context of the survival of the human race in the face of a potential Malthusian catastrophe, not that of ethnic purity. The next use of birth control that I’m aware of is some thirty-six years later, so this one is at best an outlier and more likely simply a collocation of the two words and unrelated to our present-day use of the term.
That next use is in Montana’s Anaconda Standard of 19 August 1914:
Race suicide is virtue. At least Emma Goldman says so. In her final lecture in Butte last night, she took strong opposition to that so frequently advanced by Roosevelt. Miss Goldman is in favor of the rich raising the children for the wars and the factories, because they can best afford it. There are too many poor in the world now, and those already here should be given a chance. The strike against birth, so Miss Goldman says, is becoming one of the growing and irresistible world movements. In New York they organized a “birth control league,” and they are advocating laws that will legalize instruction, means and scientific knowledge along that line.
Goldman’s speech was delivered shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, hence the reference to war.
And there is this Associated Press piece from South Carolina’s Columbia Record of 20 October 1916 that uses birth control in reference to the efforts of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood:
New York. Oct. 20.—Mrs. Margaret Sanger of this city, who was arrested and convicted but not punished while in Portland, Ore., recently for advocating birth control, announced today that clinics for the dissemination of information on the subject soon are to open in San Francisco, Cleveland and other western and inland cities. The police are searching for a clinic which is being conducted in the east New York section of Brooklyn and which has been advertised by distribution of handbills in English, Yiddish and Italian. The teaching of birth control here is a misdemeanor under the law.
I often find that the historical, literary, and social histories of a term are more interesting than the linguistics underlying it. And this is a good example. Birth control is still very much a contentious political issue, and the underlying politics of class, morality, and white supremacy that make the contraception controversial are the same today as they were a century ago.
Sources:
Associated Press. “Arrested, Unpunished Woman Still Advocates Birth Control Clinics.” Columbia Record (South Carolina), 20 October 1916, 1/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers. (Database metadata incorrectly identifies the date as 3 October.)
Gaskill, G. A. Letter to Charles Darwin (13 November 1878). In Jane Hume Clapperton. Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885, 337–340 at 338. HathiTrust Digital Library.
“Opposed to Ideas Advanced by T. R.” Anaconda Standard (Montana), 19 August 1914, 9/2. NewspaperArchive.com.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2020, s.v. birth control, n.
Photo credit: Sarahmirk, 2020. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.