View high resolution
Whether or not women should pay for having sex—whether financially or through pregnancy—has been, shall we say, a hot topic for centuries. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. birth rate dropped dramatically because of new technologies (rubber condoms, that invention of Goodyear). Teddy Roosevelt decried contraception as “race suicide.” Margaret Sanger went to jail for keeping women from withering and dying from gestating and delivering one after another bundle of joy. Late 19th and early 20th century pundits said the nation would become a bordello if anyone could have sex without consequences, and warned of the death of the American family. Not until 1965, in the landmark case Griswold v. Connecticut, did the United States Supreme Court declare that states had no right to ban the purchase of contraception, saying it violated citizens’ right to marital privacy, which was “intimate to the degree of being sacred.” (Declaring sex to be sacred? Moral crusader Anthony Comstock rolled over in his grave.) Seven years later, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Supreme Court struck down Massachusetts’ ban on distributing birth control to single women. Roe v. Wadegets all the love/hate, but Griswold and Baird changed more women’s lives.
