Ancestry Magazine

Let’s face it, as long as people have been having babies, they’ve tried to figure out how to avoid having babies. Some societies used contraceptive measures to keep the population under control, and some couples prevented pregnancy to manage the size of their families. Plus, childbirth can be a dangerous business. No wonder our ancestors, starting thousands of years ago, have sought creative ways to prevent pregnancy. Let’s take a look.

1550 BC
Apples, dates, honey, and acacia. Sounds like the beginnings of a fine dish. Actually, it’s a recipe for a barrier-style contraceptive used in ancient Egypt. If you don’t find this concoction appealing, consider what was used only centuries earlier: crocodile dung mixed with sour milk and honey.

515–500 BC
Pregnancies among royal concubines in the court of Chinese Emperor Shennong are terminated using mercury.

400 BC
Once upon a time there was a plant so successful at preventing unwanted pregnancies that it was used into extinction: silphium. In the Greek colony of Cyrene, on the coast of Africa, silphium is worth its weight in silver. It is so valuable to the area that they even memorialize it on their coins. However, the Greeks never figure out how to cultivate the plant, and by about 100 AD there is no more.

AD 100
Greek physician Soranus recommends a bit of calisthenics to prevent pregnancy. After engaging in sexual intercourse, he suggests jumping backwards seven times.

650
For thousands of years, many cultures used a horrific and yet widely accepted form of population control—infanticide. This practice is specifically outlawed in the Koran.

1480
In The Secrets of Women, Albert Magnus, a Dominician priest from Bavaria, reveals his choice for birth control: eating a bee. Be careful though. Apparently this act leaves you sterile permanently.

1647
Condoms have existed in one form or another for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians used linen fabrics soaked in salt solutions; the Japanese wore leather sheaths; and the Chinese employed silk paper. Around 1647, several condoms, made from animal intestines, are discarded in the outdoor lavatory of Dudley Castle in England. Hundreds of years later, they are found by archaeologists and remain some of the earliest surviving examples of this type of protection.

1774
Casanova. His sexual exploits have been written about and even made into movies. As you might expect, this Italian seducer knew a thing or two about protecting himself and his partner. In his memoirs, Histoire de ma vie, Casanova introduces the reader to the use of fruit as a contraceptive. A lemon half or wedge would be used much like a cervical cap to block sperm. And, the lemon’s acidic nature worked as a spermicide.

1871
You probably know Elizabeth Cady Stanton for her role in the women’s suffrage movement. But did you know she promoted sexual abstinence within marriage? For the purpose of birth control, anyway. On the lecture circuit, Stanton spoke to women-only audiences about “voluntary motherhood.” She believed that wives had the right to say no to sex even within marriage, and she proposed both partners should refrain from sex in order to prevent pregnancies.

1916
The first birth control clinic in the United States opens. Founder Margaret Sanger is subsequently jailed.

1960
The Food and Drug Administration approves the first birth control pill—Enovid.

2008
Two hundred years ago, the creation of the smallpox vaccine changed the face of the world, protecting us from one of the deadliest known diseases. So what do vaccines hold for our future? Would you believe pregnancy prevention? Scientists are currently working on immunocontraceptives that target reproductive hormones. One vaccine could leave a woman—or a man— temporarily infertile, without permanently impairing her or his ability to reproduce.