Ever since we humans figured out that sex makes babies, we’ve tried things to stop the baby part of the equation. Wolf pee, beaver testicles, a bone from a totally black cat, a juice glass, a cat’s liver, and a mule’s earwax are just some of the more dubious birth control methods that have been tried throughout history.

This June marks the 40th anniversary of the Canadian government’s decision to legalize contraception for birth control. Prior to 1969, use of contraception for birth control was illegal and could only be prescribed by physicians to women who needed help regulating their menstrual cycle. Legalization gave Canadian women the right to prevent pregnancy, but it was also an important stepping stone for other freedoms for women, including equality in education and jobs.

Legalization certainly paved the way for important contraceptive innovations, giving today’s women a wide variety of relatively safe and effective choices, from condoms and pills to patches and rings, and a bunch of other methods in between.

But while birth control is widely available, it still isn’t covered and access to information — as well as the age necessary for parental and/or spousal or partner consent — varies from province to province. As a result, you get situations like the one an emergency room doctor told me about involving a young couple who came in complaining that the young woman was throwing up. After assessing her symptoms, the doctor asked if there was any chance she might be pregnant.

“No, impossible,” she said. “I’m on the Pill.” The doctor asked her if she’d missed any pills. “No, I’ve taken all mine. Honey, have you missed any of yours?” she asked her young boyfriend.

“No, I’ve taken all mine,” he responded.

The doctor almost had to leave the room so great was his shock when he realized what was going on. Apparently, so she wouldn’t have to bear the full responsibility of birth control, they were sharing the pills. Hey, more guys should be so considerate. Still, you have to wonder how long it would be before he showed up in the emergency asking the doc about his new breasts.

Not every male is as eager to take responsibility for birth control. Getting a guy to wear a condom, for example, is still often met with resistance despite the fact that we’ve been yelling at them to get over it for years. Way back in 1936, in Sex, Marriage and Birth Control: A Guidebook to a Satisfactory Sex Life in Marriage, author Alfred Henry Tyrer had stern words for guys who whined that “their ardour might suffer a set-back” by using a condom.

“Now it is very true that some men object strenuously to using condoms,” he wrote, “but where a wife’s health, perhaps even her life, to say nothing of the happiness and welfare of the home, may be at stake, no reasonable man will refuse to take advantage of something that is simple and dependable.”

Mind you, not everyone could afford a steady supply of fresh condoms back then either. And you could only reuse them so many times. (Yes, they reused them.) Another option? For a few pennies, you could pick up a rubber sponge at your local drug store, carve it into a hollow cup shape (“not difficult to do provided one has a little patience and a sharp pair of scissors”), sew a thread into it, sterilize it in a little boiling water, soak it in olive oil (believed to be a good contraceptive), and slide
it on up.

If you were really, really tight for cash, you could just grab a rag and a bit of string, soak it in some vinegar and water, and toss that up there. It may seem a little primitive, but it’s a far cry from the Middle Ages when women believed pregnancy could be avoided by walking three times around a spot where a wolf had urinated.

Today, women have more birth control options available to them than ever, none of which involve wolf pee or beaver testicles. Still, one of the major stumbling blocks to widespread acceptance of birth control and subsequently smaller families was the church, which often still views birth control as interference with the “will of God.”

Of course, as Tyrer figured out back in 1936, if things were left to the “will of God,” Canada’s population would be about 320,000,000 by the year 2036.