Women’s rights activists have fought to promote birth control for decades. Some even promote birth control as a means of reducing abortion rates. No conception, no pregnancy, no abortion – it’s that simple, right?

But there’s one critical piece of information that birth control advocates gloss over time and time again: the disturbing history. The history of birth control traces back just over 100 years to its roots in systemic racism, ableism, and classism. This tool of discrimination is now celebrated as a breakthrough in reproductive healthcare.

How did this happen? Where did we go wrong?

The term “birth control” comes from the American eugenics movement of the early 1900s. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines eugenics as “the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population’s genetic composition”.

The term was coined by English anthropologist Francis Galton in the 1800s after becoming inspired by Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Galton used ‘eugenics’ to describe his idea of altering natural selection for the progression of human development. An elite group of wealthy, white Americans then introduced this philosophy to the U.S. to conceal and further their racially charged agenda beyond the abolition of slavery. Their main concern: preventing the loss of “racial purity” from interracial marriage in a post-slavery society.

Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League (now known as Planned Parenthood), was the driving force that took eugenics from a mere philosophy and put it into action. She was a leading pioneer of contraception as a means of population control through mass sterilization. Sanger and other eugenicists sought to weaponize birth control against the fertility of Black people, disabled people, unemployed people, and more to keep them from “reproducing their kind”. This objective is what drove the creation of modern-day contraception: control who can give birth, and who cannot.