in stride, but many advocates lives were dominated and ruined

by the consequences of their commitment to birth control. Fol-

lowing months of imprisonment under the Comstock laws, and
facing another five year sentence, sex educator and free-love ad-
vocate Ida Craddock’s suicide note specifically named and con-
demned Anthony Comstock as bearing responsibility for her
death. Lectures were broken up by police, written material was
seized and destroyed—yet advocates fought on, and continue to
fight the forces of ignorance to this day, because of their recog-
nition of what the struggle is really about.
It was in this era that the term “birth control” was intro-
duced by famous activist Margaret Sanger, demonstrating her
understanding of what contraception truly meant. Prior to her
coinage, the preferred term was “family limitation,” but as the
current term makes clear, the issue was never limitation, or
families, but control—control over female bodies and lives.
Though Sanger’s support for eugenics make her impossible
to view as a hero, her commitment to birth control and her
ceaseless work to secure women’s access to it make her equally
impossible to dismiss.
That understanding of what contraception is really about is
truly the most important thing we can learn from the struggle
for birth control rights. Arguments made against contracep-
tion may be couched in concerns for morals, for decency, but
these are mere excuses for their true purpose: the securing of
power over female bodies. No one who would seek such power
should be trusted, nor should any claim on their part to have
any interest in morals or decency. Morality, as I said before, is
easily bent, and as such, those who seek to control the lives and
bodies of women have seized upon moral claims as a weapon.
We have seen the world that ignorance and prudery created,
and we have no wish to return there.
. 126 .