The Social and Economic Structure of Contemporary Europe611
rights in some Western countries challenged this trend.
Aletta Jacobs still maintained the world’s first birth con-
trol clinic, which she had opened in Amsterdam in
- A paleobotanist at the University of London,
Marie Stopes, in 1921 opened the first British birth con-
trol clinic—the Mothers’ Clinic for Constructive Birth
Control. Stopes’s Contraception: Its Theory, History, and Prac-
ticewas published in 1923, and she continued to fight for
easy public access to contraceptives as president of the
Society for Constructive Birth Control.
Strong opposition existed to birth control clinics
and contraceptives in the interwar years. Pronatalist
governments, such as the conservative coalition led by
Raymond Poincaré in France, the Fascist government of
Benito Mussolini in Italy, and the Nazi regime in Ger-
many, all strove to defend motherhood and to increase
the population. The Vatican strongly supported this
position in 1930 when Pope Pius XI issued the first en-
cyclical opposed to birth control, Casti connubi.Pius XI
left no doubt about the correct moral position for
Catholics: “Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised
in such a way that the [sex] act is deliberately frustrated
in its natural power to generate life is an offense against
the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in
such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.” Some
Catholic states responded to Casti connubi.The Irish not
only outlawed birth control, but they also deemed a
felony the importing, selling, or advertising of any birth
control device or any birth control instructions (such as
Marie Stopes’s book).
European birthrates, however, show that millions of
people, including Catholics, defied both church and
state and practiced birth control. Birth control advo-
cates, often led by champions of women’s rights, won
changes in restrictive laws after World War II. Postwar
scientists also changed the nature of contraception.
The principle behind oral contraceptives—changing a
woman’s balance of hormones—was well understood in
the 1940s, and supplementary hormone pills were de-
veloped and tested in the 1950s. The first oral contra-
ceptive, Enovid, was marketed in the United States in
1960, and “the pill” was introduced in Britain as
Conovid in 1961. France legalized contraceptives in
1967; although conservative governments restricted
this law in many indirect ways, the French nation voted
with their bodies. An International Conference on Pop-
ulation held in 1994 estimated that France had the
highest rate of contraception in the world. Eighty per-
cent of all married Frenchwomen used contraceptives,
while a rate of 70 percent to 80 percent was reported in
many other countries (including the United States).
Spain legalized contraceptives after the death of Gen-
eral Franco, and 500,000 Spanish women began using
the pill in the first three years that it was legal. After a
long and passionate debate, Ireland legalized contra-
ceptives in 1985 for people over the age of eighteen.
And the government of Ireland even began to provide
free contraceptives (although not condoms) to recipi-
ents of government-supported health care.
Conservatives, led by the Vatican, did not abandon
the battle against birth control information and devices.
When the birth control pill became popular in many
Western countries in the late 1960s, Pope Paul VI reit-
erated the church’s total opposition to birth control in
his 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae(Of Human Life). De-
spite the clear evidence that Catholics accepted and
used birth control, Pope John Paul II continued the
strenuous rejection of all contraceptives in policy state-
ments of 1987 and 1995. As late as 1995 John Paul II’s
encyclical, Evangelium vitae(The Gospel of Life), force-
fully asserted that birth control was one of modern so-
ciety’s “crimes against life” and “a significant cause of
grave moral decline.”
The most controversial check on population
growth, however, was not birth control but abortion.
Abortion had long been illegal but had nonetheless
been widely practiced in most of Europe. Pope Pius IX
had denounced abortion and made it an excommunica-
tory sin in 1870. British laws of 1803 and 1861 had ex-
pressly outlawed abortion, providing penalties up to life
imprisonment. The same statutes also criminalized
many forms of assisting an abortion, such as sharing an
abortifacient medication. The criminal code of newly
unified Germany in 1871 made abortion a serious crime
with five-year prison sentences. The French legislation
of 1920 that targeted birth control also tightened the
laws against abortion, establishing large new fines and
longer prison sentences for performing an abortion,
having an abortion, or providing information about
abortion. Under those statutes, a prominent French
feminist who had long championed a woman’s right to
control her own body, Dr. Madeleine Pelletier, was im-
prisoned (and died) in a mental asylum in 1939. Mus-
solini promulgated strict anti-abortion legislation in
1930, branding abortion a crime against “the health of
the race.” The foremost exception to the strict laws
against abortion came in the Soviet Union, where
Lenin’s government legalized abortion in 1920. The de-
cree required all physicians to perform an abortion if a
pregnant woman requested it during the first two-and-
one-half months of pregnancy. Stalin, however, re-
voked this decree and recriminalized abortion in 1936.
