Gallery Carre
Weird contraception: Don’t try this at home
Oct 13th, 2024 by Audacia Ray
People have come up with bizarre, and often totally misguided, methods to prevent pregnancy over the years. Like wearing the testicles of a weasel on their thighs. Or amulets with desiccated cat livers or shards of bones. Some were advised to use elephant dung as a spermicide. And others used wads of seaweed as a female condom.
Percy Skuy, the former president of Ortho-Macneill, started collecting weird and historical contraceptives in the early 1960s when he was just starting out at the company. He’s amassed more than 700 items, and the collection is now housed at the Dittrick Medical History Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
(with work safe pictures of peculiar devices)
And if you want to know more than necessary about the history of contraception, check out Andrea Tone’s Devices and Desires
Link
Don’t try this at home indeed…
Evidently my Great Grandmother would spray Lysol up into her vagina after intercourse with my Great Grandfather. She became pregnant with her third child 11 years after her second… She famously ( and undoubtably cruely) told my Great Aunt time and again during her childhood ” You were born because I couldn’t get the cap off the Lysol bottle in time.” Oy Vey.
wtf! Lysol??? That must’ve really stung. (Crossing legs)
And did how did Great Aunt retaliate?
wtf indeed.
Great Aunt retaliated by being the most colorful, Beloved and caring, person to come out of that family. She also outlived them all by decades.
Lysol was actually a highly recommended douche - like, recommended by Planned Parenthood - well into the 20th century. The practice of douching was supposed to be one of the best forms of birth control, though today we know that it actually helps to push sperm up into the uterus and makes contraception more likely.