[gentle music] (host) What do World War I, Lysol, and a sausage maker have to do with each other?

They all play a big role in the history of birth control.

It's gonna get weird.

The internet is filled with claims about early birth-control methods such as animal-intestine condoms, which were real, pessaries, coitus interruptus-- you could go ahead and look that one up on your own-- and a truly gross-sounding sap from ancient Egypt involving crocodile dung.

But let's not forget silphium, the ancient, potentially extinct fennel plant mentioned in our episode on the origins of the heart shape.

But since many of these claims are kind of fuzzy, I wanted to separate facts from internet fictions by spending this week naming the six funkiest historically true facts about birth control.

But before we get into this, I'm gonna drop the disclaimer I drop at the top of any episode involving medicine.

This is an episode on medical history, and not a video of medical advice.

If you have questions regarding the use of birth control or about your own care, then please seek the advice of trained medical professionals.

Get it?

Got it?

Good.

Fact one: Lysol disinfectant used to be advertised as a contraception method for women.

While people were waiting for reliable forms of birth control to become widely available in mid 20th century America, they often resorted to desperate measures to prevent unplanned pregnancies.

One particularly strange example is that in the first half of the 20th century, Lysol disinfectant was advertised as a cleansing agent and douche for women, although it was also widely believed to be an effective contraceptive.

This proved to be untrue, and despite its high popularity during the Great Depression, it's also important to note that the pre-1953 formula for Lysol contained cresol, which caused burning, irritation, and death in some users.

Similarly, there's the contraceptive legend that Coca-Cola could work as an effective spermicide if applied using a technique that vaguely mirrored the Mentos challenge.

Newsflash-- both of these were terrible and ineffective ideas.

Fact two: How we got the word "condom" is still unknown.

Despite the popular mythologies of how the condom first got its name, including claims that it was drawn from the name of a fabled and unverified physician in the court of Charles II named "Dr.

Condom," the origin of this particular word remains unclear.

Some earlier iterations of the word included "condum" with a U instead of an O, "condon" with an N, and "cundum" with two Us, although these versions have fallen out of usage.

Though many strides have been made in condom technology, the form of the condom is one of the earliest and most enduring types of birth controls touching back thousands of years to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, although the evidence of these early condoms or sheaths is largely anecdotal and sparse, so it's hard to pinpoint if they were widely used.

But according to late medical historian Vern Bullough, the earliest widespread medical recommendation of the condom can be traced back to an Italian physician named Gabriele Falloppio, sometimes called Fallopius, whose name later served as the inspiration for the name of Fallopian tubes-- recommended in the book "De Morbo Gallico," published in the 1570s, that men wore linen condoms to prevent venereal diseases, specifically syphilis, which was spreading rapidly around Europe at this time and was even more lethal than it is today.

Falloppio correctly identified that wearing linen sheaths tied with a ribbon at the top to keep them in place during intercourse, helped reduce the spread of the disease.

As for why they're also called "rubbers," well, that had to do with the vulcanization of rubber in the late 1830s and early 1840s.

Invented by Charles Goodyear, whose name was given to the tire company, vulcanization made rubber more malleable and durable, so rubber condoms and diaphragms became more widely available than their linen and animal intestine counterparts.

Fact three: Selling illegal condoms was big business in America.

New innovations in rubber and the advent of latex rubber in the early 20th century led to an increase in the production and spread of effective birth control.

But while some folks in the late 19th and early 20th century were just plain embarrassed to purchase them, it wasn't just embarrassment that was stopping folks; it was also against the law.

In 1873, the U.S. passed the Comstock Act, which was designed as an "act of the suppression of trade in "and circulation of obscene literature and articles of immoral use."

And this included the sale of information about birth control or any birth control devices, or sending and receiving these devices in the mail.

And some vestiges of these laws remained on the books until the 1960s and '70s with some states even passing their own versions that were even stricter than the federal regulations.

But the Comstock laws didn't shut down the birth-control business altogether.

According to medical historian Andrea Tone, condom companies were booming business as early as the 1880s and continued to grow in popularity into the early 20th century.

Also, one of the earliest condom companies was founded in 1883 by a German Jewish immigrant named Julius Schmid, who put his experience as a sausage maker to use, popularizing the use of animal intestine sheaths as condoms before later marketing his vulcanized rubber condoms as "French goods and medicines" as a euphemism to help skirt the law.

Fact four: The woman who coined the term "birth control" was arrested multiple times for providing accurate medical information.

In the early 20th century, around the same time that legislators and condom companies were fighting over who could receive different methods of contraception in the mail, a young nurse named Margaret Sanger was advocating for increased access to birth control for all women.

Inspired by the story of her own mother, who died at age 50 after 11 births and 7 miscarriages, as well as the poor women she was treating as a nurse in New York City, Sanger spent her life distributing information about birth control, as well as birth-control devices, to women in need.

She coined the term "birth control" in 1914, and was jailed numerous times throughout her life for breaking obscenity laws like the Comstock Act.

In 1916, she opened a family planning clinic in Brooklyn, and for ten cents, any woman could receive accurate information about reproduction and birth control.

The clinic was closed after a month, and Sanger was jailed for 30 days after she refused to make a statement that she would never repeat her offenses.

But although Sanger's primary mission was to prevent women from suffering due to unwanted pregnancies, she also has a complicated and troubling connection to language surrounding eugenics.

Her American Birth Control League, founded in 1921, served as a predecessor to Planned Parenthood.

In the 1950's, Sanger extended her cause to trying to fund a viable hormonal birth control pill for women.

According to an article by time.com, she approached a doctor named Gregory Pincus to create a contraceptive pill.

Although by that time, another doctor in Mexico City named Carl Djerassi had already discovered a pill that could prevent ovulation.

In 1956, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of hormone pills for the treatment of menstrual disorders.

And in 1960, they approved Enovid as a contraceptive pill.

By 1965, when birth control became legal nationwide for married couples, 6.5 million women were taking birth control pills to prevent pregnancy.

And a report from the CDC in 2012 shows that between 2006 and 2010, 62% of women who were of reproductive age were using some form of birth control, which includes the pill, IUDs, and condoms.

Fact five: World War I and II helped lead to the legalization of condoms in America.

During World War I, the spread of venereal disease among soldiers was a huge concern for allied troops.

And Schmid, the same sausage maker that helped to popularize the use of condoms in the late 19th century, made a huge profit selling his sheaths to Allied soldiers, but not American Allied soldiers.

The U.S. encouraged troops to practice "moral prophylaxis" while in the field, which didn't exactly work since 10% of American troops contracted venereal diseases during World War I.

By 1918, the New York Appeals Court said that condoms could be used because they had a so-called legitimate medical purpose-- disease prevention.

This decision was strengthened when federal appeals courts also decided in the 1930s that doctors could legally prescribe condoms to their patients for the purposes of disease control.

As a result, condoms were also widely used by U.S. soldiers during World War II, and Schmid became the official condom supplier of the U.S. Army.

Fact six: Birth control wasn't available legally to everyone in the U.S. until 1972.

Birth control continued to be regulated by state and federal laws until the tides changed in 1965.

That was the year that the Supreme Court decided in Griswold v. Connecticut that married couples could obtain birth control without restrictions.

But it wasn't because providing access to contraceptives was pitched as a health concern related to disease control, or even for the purposes of family planning, but rather because restricting birth control was found to be a violation of marital privacy.

And it wasn't until seven years after that, that birth control became legal for everyone across the country regardless of marital status.

So how does it all add up?

Well, it seems like as long as people have been reproducing, they've also been looking for ways to control the number of resulting births.

And that has ranged from a variety of interventions, which could stink, in the case of crocodile dung, or could actually burn you, like Lysol disinfectant.

But despite the stigma and criminalization around many methods of birth control into the 20th century, the use of safe and effective birth control has continued to rise.

And just because there's a wide range of birth control products available across the country and the world, that doesn't mean that new innovations aren't still in the works.

For example, researchers are still investigating ways to create safe, effective daily birth control methods for men, which include gels, non-surgical vasectomies, and male birth control pills.

So while Coca-Cola may not be making a comeback in the birth-control game, thank goodness, we may still see new forms of birth control arriving on the market once studies are complete.

Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.