Volume 55, Number 13 · August 14, 2008
The Strange History of Birth Control
By Helen Epstein
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population
by Matthew Connelly
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 521 pp., $35.00
Reproducing Inequities: Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti
by M. Catherine Maternowska, with a foreword by Paul Farmer
Rutgers University Press, 221 pp., $69.00; $26.95 (paper)
In the 1920s it was illegal to advertise contraceptive diaphragms in the US or send them through the mail, and anyone who wrote about them risked imprisonment for indecency. The devices were entirely banned in some states, and in others doctors prescribed them only to women for whom pregnancy posed a clear health risk, if at all. Most couples relied on condoms, withdrawal, and douches, including the popular disinfectant Lysol, which was advertised in magazines along with 'fountain syringes.'[1]
Review, 4232 words
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