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Birth Control

  • If one is willing to have children, rhythm is probably the best method of contraception.

  • The greatest of all contraceptives is affluence.

  • Me and my husband just found a new method of birth control that really works. Every night before we go to bed, we spend an hour with our kids.

    • Roseanne Barr,
    • in Geraldine Barr with Ted Schwarz, My Sister Roseanne ()
  • Fang, the idiot, was watching television one night and a guy was showing how to use a condom by putting on a sock. Now Fang is carrying a sock in his wallet.

  • ... I still take the pill. I don't want any more grandchildren.

  • If he ain't willin' to strap on the rubber bridle, then I ain't willin' to ride.

  • We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.

  • ... given a choice between hearing my daughter say 'I'm pregnant' or 'I used a condom,' most mothers would get up in the middle of the night and buy them herself.

  • And if the problem [with contraception] is promiscuity, then why does the immense popularity of Viagra go unchecked? Doesn't it make more sense to leave the bullets out of the gun than to try to avoid being shot? Especially when the gun is an old musket, and you have to clean it out and tamp down gunpowder, melt down scraps of lead and pour it into a mold, wait for it to cool — only to have it take forever to finally go off?

  • Joan ... had five kids in the '60s before she became a recovering Catholic ('We used the rhythm method for the last three') ...

  • Anybody who's against birth control and abortion has to be a criminal idiot.

  • Invented long ago by a man, the diaphragm is a good, if completely ridiculous, method of birth control, whose safety is without peer, but whose hilarious method of operation seems like something made up by the Playtex Rubber Gloves company in cahoots with Martin Short. ... Also, as is often the case with things involving the vagina, proper insertion is crucial.

  • Chastity belt: A labor-saving device.

  • Joe always had plenty of protectors. But I learned about another way, too. You tied a piece of sponge on a silk string. Attached, see? Yuh wet the sponge in warm water before puttin' it in. Afterward you pulled it out and washed it.

    • Mae West,
    • in George Eells and Stanley Musgrove, Mae West ()
  • No, it is not because woman is lacking in responsibility, but because she has too much of the latter that she demands to know how to prevent conception.

    • Emma Goldman,
    • "The Social Aspects of Birth Control," in Mother Earth ()
  • It is the woman who is ultimately held responsible for pregnancy. While not being allowed to have control over her body, she is nevertheless held responsible for its products.

  • Without the means to prevent, and to control the timing of, conception, economic and political rights have limited meaning for women. If women cannot plan their pregnancies, they can plan little else in their lives ...

  • [Condom:] ... an armor against enjoyment and a spider web against danger.

    • Madame de Sévigné,
    • 1671, Letters of Madame de Sévigné to Her Daughter and Her Friends, vol. 1 ()
  • [On Marie Stopes, noted contraception pioneer:] Up to his death three years earlier she had been living with Lord Alfred Douglas, the fatal lover of Oscar Wilde, an arrangement which I imagine would satisfy any woman's craving for birth control.

  • A modern and humane civilization must control conception or sink into barbaric cruelty to individuals.

  • In Colorado we called people who used the rhythm system 'parents.'

  • 'This damned thing,' he said.... 'You're speaking of the sixteenth of an inch between me and the Home for Unwed Mothers.'

  • The Catholic wife is under great pressure ... If she uses contraceptives, she is called wicked by her parish priest. If she follows the advice of her parish priest and refrains from sexual intercourse, she is called cold by her husband. If she doesn't take steps, she is called mad by society at large.

  • Through its prohibition on birth control, the Church has suggested that the only right way to have children is through biological reproduction: a kind of forced labor culminating in the production of another soul for God. What kind of a God stands like Lee Iacocca at the end of an assembly line, driving his workers with a greedy 'More! More!' while the automobiles pile up in showrooms and on freeways and in used-car lots and finally junkyards, his only satisfaction the gross production figures at the end of every quarter?

  • The greatest issue is to raise the question of birth control out of the gutter of obscenity ... into the light of intelligence and human understanding.

  • Birth control.

  • No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

  • ... birth control is the means by which woman attains basic freedom ...

  • Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.

  • No woman can call herself free who cannot choose the time to be a mother or not as she sees fit.

  • [On her adolescent pregnancy prevention program in Georgia:] If they can see their future like middle-class kids can, they're motivated not to do what endangers that future. Hope is the best contraceptive.

  • The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.

  • [On being asked if she would favor birth control laws:] I will if you make it retroactive.

  • Hope is the best contraceptive.

  • Teenagers were the best form of birth control.

  • If we can't preserve the privacy of our right to procreate, I can't imagine what rights we will be able to protect.