Birth control was illegal through much of the 1900s because a federal law passed in 1873 classified contraceptives as “obscene” materials, placing them in the same legal category as pornography. This law, called the Comstock Act, didn’t just ban contraceptive devices. It banned mailing information about contraception, and states piled on with their own versions that went even further. The result was nearly a century of criminalization that took multiple court battles, activist arrests, and landmark Supreme Court rulings to fully undo.
The Comstock Act: The Law That Started It All
The foundation of birth control prohibition was the Comstock Act of 1873, a federal anti-obscenity law championed by Anthony Comstock, a self-styled “anti-vice crusader.” The law made it a federal offense to transport by mail or common carrier any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials. Contraceptives, along with any written information about contraception, were explicitly included in that definition alongside pornography.
The penalties were serious. Anyone convicted faced six months to five years in prison, a fine between $100 and $2,000 (equivalent to roughly $2,500 to $50,000 today), or both. The definition of “obscene” was left deliberately broad, with no clear restrictions on how far authorities could stretch it. This gave enforcers enormous power to prosecute virtually anyone involved in the manufacture, distribution, or even discussion of birth control.
Within a few decades, the law’s reach expanded dramatically. State legislatures and local governments passed their own versions, commonly known as “Little Comstock Laws,” which went beyond the federal mailing ban. In many states, doctors were prohibited from even discussing birth control with their own patients. The ironic result was that Americans were pushed toward an underground market of unregulated patent medicines and devices, which were often ineffective and sometimes dangerous.
The Moral and Religious Arguments Behind the Ban
The Comstock Act didn’t arise in a vacuum. It drew on centuries of religious opposition to contraception. The Roman Catholic Church had long forbidden contraceptive use, calling it a sin against nature, a position traceable to Saint Augustine in the 5th century. Protestant denominations in the late 1800s largely agreed, viewing contraception as an interference with God’s design for procreation within marriage.
Beyond theology, the political argument was framed around public morality. Advocates of the ban believed that access to contraception would encourage sexual activity outside marriage and erode social order. Comstock and his allies saw reproductive control as inseparable from broader “vice,” which is why the law lumped contraceptives together with pornographic material. In their view, preventing people from obtaining birth control was no different from preventing them from accessing any other corrupting influence. This moral framing gave the law broad public support for decades, particularly among lawmakers who feared being seen as soft on obscenity.
What Happened When People Fought Back
The most famous challenge to these laws came from Margaret Sanger, a nurse who opened a birth control clinic in Brooklyn in October 1916. Because neither Sanger nor the others working at the clinic were licensed physicians, they violated Section 1142 of the New York State Penal Code, which prohibited distributing contraceptive materials. In January 1917, all three women who ran the clinic were tried separately and found guilty. Sanger was sentenced to 30 days in the Queens County Penitentiary.
Her appeal, however, produced a crack in the legal wall. The resulting Crane decision became the first legal ruling to allow birth control for “therapeutic purposes.” This narrow exception meant contraception could be prescribed when pregnancy posed a serious threat to a woman’s life. It was a far cry from broad access, but it gave Sanger enough legal footing to eventually open the first lawful birth control clinic in the United States, operating strictly under the requirement that contraceptives were being used for medical reasons.
A second major turning point came in 1936 with a federal court case involving a package of contraceptive devices imported from Japan. The Second Circuit ruled that the Comstock Act did not bar doctors from importing contraceptives for legitimate medical purposes. The court reasoned that Congress had never intended to prevent physicians from providing care essential to women’s health. This decision gave doctors across the country the legal authority to use their own professional judgment in prescribing contraception, though many state-level bans remained firmly in place.
How Long the Bans Actually Lasted
Even after the 1936 ruling loosened federal restrictions for physicians, several states continued to criminalize contraception for everyone, including married couples. Connecticut’s law was among the most extreme, making it a crime to simply use a contraceptive. That law stayed on the books until 1965, when the Supreme Court struck it down in Griswold v. Connecticut. The Court ruled that married couples have a right to privacy that cannot be overridden by a state law criminalizing contraceptive use. While the Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention a right to privacy, the justices reasoned that it flows naturally from several guarantees in the Bill of Rights.
Griswold only applied to married couples. Unmarried individuals didn’t gain the same legal protection until 1972, when the Supreme Court extended contraceptive access to all adults in Eisenstadt v. Baird. That means birth control was, in some form, legally restricted in parts of the United States for nearly a full century after the Comstock Act passed.
Why It Took So Long to Change
The durability of these laws came down to a combination of factors. The obscenity framework was politically useful: few legislators wanted to publicly advocate for materials classified alongside pornography. Religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, maintained steady opposition that influenced lawmakers at every level of government. And the legal structure itself was layered. Even when federal courts chipped away at the Comstock Act, individual states could maintain their own bans independently.
The medical profession was also slow to push back. For decades, many doctors simply avoided the topic rather than risk prosecution under state obscenity laws. It took a sustained activist movement, spanning from Sanger’s arrest in 1916 through multiple Supreme Court cases in the 1960s and 1970s, to dismantle a legal system that had treated basic reproductive information as criminal material for the better part of a century.