From Pennyroyal to Mifepristone: What Demographers Missed about Birth Control?

Abstract

In recent decades some historians have found that premodern Western people employed a variety of birth controls while they exercised a degree of control over their reproduction. Reacting to this claim, prominent demographers contend there was no discernable birth control until about the 1890s. For over three millennia, herbal menstrual regulators were likely the most widely used birth control means. Historians examined medical, legal, anecdotal, and other sources in regions in Spain, modern Greece, Ireland, Australia, the United States, Canada, Peru, and the Caribbean islands primarily from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Demographers' claims are misguided. Menstrual regulators tors worked for the purposes intended. They gave women choices and were mostly silently executed. Some herbal regulators constrained exactly the same compound as our modern birth-control drug.