The year 1954 was in the heart of what we now refer to as the Baby Boom – the vast generation of children born after soldiers returned home from World War II.

For the most part, the women who bore those children – my mother among them – wanted to do so.

But, 70 years ago, there were few options for any woman who either wanted to enjoy sexual activity with men or, more darkly, endured nonconsensual sex.

The idea of birth control dated back to the 19th century, when groups formed in the U.S. and Britain to promote the idea of family planning. Margaret Sanger, who opened the first birth control clinic in this country, was 74 years old in 1954 and funding development of medical methods of contraception. 

Those medical methods – in the form of hormonal pills taken by women on a daily basis – first surfaced in the 1960s.

There was one problem: The disapproval of large swatches of society.

Sanger, herself, was arrested for opening those clinics and spreading information about contraception. Religions – in particular, the Roman Catholic Church – condemned birth control as being against God’s will.

In the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, by a 7-2 margin, that government prohibition of contraception information was unconstitutional. The ruling opened the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s and made family planning a reality for most Americans.

At the same time, circumstances contributed to the movement to legalize abortion.

It’s not as if there weren’t any abortions before 1973. It’s just that they were illegal. There were doctors who performed them in secret. There were also women forced to do terrible things to themselves, sometimes proving fatal, in order to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy,

And there were reasons besides an accidental pregnancy. For instance, in the early 1960s, women were prescribed a drug aimed at mitigating the discomfort than accompanies getting pregnant. 

The problem was the drug, Thalidomide, deformed the fetuses. Children were being born with defects that made for some very depressing photos on the pages of Life magazine.

In other instances, women developed life-threatening complications, and they and their families faced the horrible choice of delivering a possibly unhealthy baby or letting the woman who bore that child suffer and possibly die.

In 1967, Colorado became the first state to legalize some abortions – in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother or fetus. Three years later, New York became the first state to allow abortion for whatever reason a woman gave.

Then, of course, came Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion for whatever reason throughout the United States. The Supreme Court voted 7-2, with justices appointed by both political parties of the issue on both sides.

Women could choose to terminate a pregnancy or use a method of birth control that prevented one. That should have been the happy ending.

It wasn’t.

The forces that worked to ban birth control and abortion since the 19th century – mostly religious groups – gathered strength. The Republican Party – despite the fact that four of the seven votes for Roe were justices appointed by Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon – became a rallying point for those who wanted the decision overturned.

In 2022, with six Republican-appointed justices – three of them picked by Donald Trump – on the Court, Roe v. Wade and another case were overturned. Abortion was no longer legal everywhere. In some states, it was pretty much illegal.

One of those justices, Clarence Thomas, suggested that the Griswold ruling legalizing birth control should also be reconsidered.

This would all have been bewildering to my parents in 1954, But my mother lived to see a lot of this happen and fully supported the idea that a woman has the right to choose what she does with her body.

She would be really upset if she saw the current situation.