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Nurse Margaret Sanger believed that “enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty." After she coined the term birth control, she started a decades-long campaign to legalize birth control and make it accessible for everyone -
Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York but was arrested one year later on charges of "maintaining a public nuisance." After being released from jail, she re-opened her clinic and continued to be hinder by arrests and prosecutions. -
In 1939, many national organizations that advocate for birth control join together to form the Birth Control Federation of America and then they changed the name to Planned Parenthood in 1942. -
John Rock and Gregory Pincus start to develop the first birth control pill which was funded by the 2 million dollars that Katherine Dexter McCormick donated. The US had very strict laws in contraceptive research so they set up trials in psychiatric hospitals and on women in Puerto Rico -
Enovid is a mix of the hormones progesterone and estrogen that was approved by the FDA as birth control. It became known as "The Pill"
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In the Supreme Court ruling of Griswold v. Connecticut, it was ruled that married couples have a constitutional right to privacy which means they have access to birth control but unmarried women were still denied birth control. -
The Supreme Court ruling in Eisenstadt v Baird legalized birth control for unmarried people which was arguably one of the largest events in the Sexual Revolution -
Roe v Wade was the Supreme Court ruling which stated that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without government restriction. It removed many US laws at both the federal and state level on abortion. -
FDA approves Preven and Plan B as emergency contraception that can be used post-intercourse to prevent pregnancy after unprotected intercourse. -
Congress passed the Affordable Care Act which prohibited sex discrimination in health insurance and required all preventive health care to be covered without a copay. The Obama administration issued regulations that expanded the meaning of preventive health care to include coverage of all FDA-approved contraception.
