Birth control has been around since humans first associated sex with pregnancy. Primitive methods of birth control were limited to male withdrawal and forms of abortion of infanticide.

The first known condoms, for use as a contraceptive or to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (as opposed to sheaths used for rituals or display), were introduced in the seventeeth century. The use of condoms spread rapidly and were available from commercial outlets by the eighteenth century, although still only used by the middle and upper classes.

The nineteenth century saw the addition of the diaphragm, a cap made from vulcanized rubber designed to block sperm from reaching the cerix, to the public's available birth control options.

In the United States in the late ninteenth century, while infection rates for sexually transmitted diseases began to rise, access to contraceptives was set back by new federal and state laws banning the transmission of any 'obscene, lewd, and/or lacivious' material through the mail. These laws would become collectively known as the Comstock Laws (named after the federal Comstock Act),In many cases information about contraceptives, whether to prevent the spread of STDs or prevent pregnancies, were included in these loose definitions of obscenities.

Among those persecuted under Comstock Laws was Margaret Sanger, who was charged with disseminating contraceptive information. Sanger would become the face of the movement to make birth control available to the individuals in the United States through a series of treatises, lectures, and high-profile court cases that would eventually lift many state and federal birth control restrictions.

Sanger also underwrote research that paved the way for the invention of the first birth control pill.

By the late twentieth century birth control was widely available in most of the developed world in the form of condoms, oral contraceptives, implants or injectables, and surgical procedures.