Starting in the 1830s, a state-by-state drive to prohibit abortion developed and was largely successful by 1880. It was spurred by a backlash against the women's rights movement that reflected anxieties about women deserting their conventional position as mothers, and by professionalizing physicians eager to restrict their competition from "irregular" practitioners, many of them offering abortion services. Then in 1873 all birth-control information was specifically included within the definition of the obscene and was therefore barred from interstate commerce by the federal Comstock Act. Nevertheless the steady decline of the U.S. birthrate in the nineteenth century suggests that some traditional birth-control methods were widely used despite legal prohibition, notably, abortion, coitus interrupts, and douches.
Stronger in the United States were birth-control programs rooted in antebellum reform movements, both secular and religious. They advocated birth control to control......

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Title: The Woman Rebel:
Approximate Word Count: 1490
Approximate Pages: 6 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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