It is easy for us to stroll into the local pharmacy or grocery store and pick up condoms.
You can even find them in vending machines.
Access to the Pill, one of the most popular choices for contraception today, remains more difficult. One must visit a physician and acquire a prescription. The Pill remains more costly, an expense generally assumed by the female user. But we have come a long way in terms of the right to use it or other forms of contraception.
In 1961 the Pill became available for sale when prescribed by a physician solely for the control of menstrual cycles and related issues. However, women desiring any information concerning contraception often learned from other women through word of mouth. An underground movement for reproductive freedom formed and women taught other women how to obtain contraceptive information.
In 1968, despite laws banning the dissemination of birth control information, a student society at McGill University published a peer education guide called the Birth Control Handbook.
At Western, a group of female students distributed this handbook and, according to Mary Duncan, challenged the Student Health Services regulation “directing physicians on the staff that they could NOT provide contraception for single female students.”
Duncan and her fellow students decided that they “would provide a birth control information centre” and “also have an outreach program within the university community going out to the dorms and having film showings and so on to educate the students to fertility control methods.”
These programs were supported by the University Students’ Council.
Nation-wide, activists lobbied for legal access to contraception information and services. Finally, in 1969, under Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, an amendment to the Criminal Code of Canada was passed and the dissemination of birth control information was decriminalized.
Today it is hard for many of us to imagine living without the means or the rights to discuss and explore our reproductive and sexual health. We are bombarded with birth control information in the media and take reproductive and sexual autonomy for granted.
Our reality stands in sharp contrast to a time, only four decades ago, when one could be charged and imprisoned for accessing or advertising birth control information. We can thank the women’s movement for making sexual and reproductive choices possible for us.