10 Facts About Contraception Everyone Should Know

How Contraception Affects Everything, from Poverty to Literacy

4. Men who physically abuse their partners fear contraception. (Think about that for a moment.) 

A national study of more than 3,000 abused women conducted by the National Domestic Violence Hotline, found that 1 in 4 said their partners sabotaged, hid or prohibited use of birth control as a form of control in an already abusive relationship. These findings confirmed those of a number of smaller studies.

5. When contraception availability goes down, abortion rates go up. 

Abortion remains illegal in the Philippines but for the last decade the nation’s capital, Manila, has been at the heart of a battle over contraception. Contraception was stigmatized and difficult to access prior to 2000 when contraception was prohibited altogether by an executive order. (It is not unusual for women who have come of age in the city during the time period of the ban to have more than 10 children.) While the abortion rate in the country has barely changed in recent years, the rate in Manila increased by more than 10%. So has the number of women dying of complications from illegal abortions. 

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6. Countries with the highest fertility rates have the highest poverty rates. 

Ten of the countries with the world’s highest fertility rates are located in Africa. Between 1990 and 2001, the African continent experienced what is deemed “extreme population growth.”  The number of those on the continent living in “extreme poverty ballooned” from 231 million to 318 million. 

7. Before contraception* American women were statistically more likely to die in childbirth than they are today. 

At the start of the 20th century the maternal mortality rate in America was approximately 65 times higher than it is today. During the 17th and 18th centuries — long before modern contraception became widely available — the average American woman gave birth to between 5 and 8 children. Her likelihood of dying in childbirth increased with every birth. The number of women who died in childbirth or its immediate aftermath was 1 in every 8 women. 

*Forms of contraception have been available since ancient times (click here to see ancient forms of contraception) but contraception did not become widely available in the U.S. until the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965. Click here to read about Griswold and other key contraception cases.) 

8. Before contraception men greatly outnumbered American women in colleges. 

Today women outnumber men. In 1960, just before the Griswold decision, only 35% of college students were women. Today women represent at least 57% of students on most college campuses. 

9. Before contraception there were no female CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies. 

Katherine Graham became the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company when she became Chairman of the Washington Post Company in 1973. She inherited the publication from her husband, who had inherited the role from Graham’s father, but Graham succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectations. Since her trailblazing ascent, more than a dozen other women have reached the highest rung on the corporate ladder with a record-breaking 18 women serving as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies in 2011, the largest number in history. 

10. Before contraception women were virtually invisible in Congress. 

Just before contraception became officially legal in the U.S. (1965) there were 20 women in the House of Representatives and one female Senator, Margaret Chase Smith. None of them were women of color. (Patsy Mink, an Asian-American, was elected to her first term the year Griswold was decided by the Supreme Court.) Today there are 76 women in the House. Fourteen of them are African-American, four of them are Asian-American and seven are Latina. There are 17 women in the Senate. 

And for the record, I doubt any of them want to return to the days when men spoke and voted for them, or for any of the rest of us blessed with ovaries.

Keli Goff is a Contributing Editor for Loop21.com. Read more at www.keligoff.com