Sexual revolution
Contraception

As birth control became widely accessible, men and women began to have more choice in the matter of having children than ever before. The 1916 invention of thin, disposable latex condoms for men led to widespread affordable condoms by the 1930s; the demise of the Comstock laws in 1936 set the stage for the promotion of available effective contraceptives such as the diaphragm and cervical cap; the 1960s introduction of the IUD and oral contraceptives for women gave a sense of freedom from barrier contraception. The Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI (1968) published Humanae vitae (Of Human Life), which was a declaration that banned the use of artificial contraception. Churches allowed for the rhythm method, which was a method of regulating fertility that pushed men and women to take advantage of the "natural cycles" of female fertility, during which women were "naturally infertile." The opposition of Churches (e.g. Humanae vitae) led people who felt alienated from or not represented by religion to form parallel movements of secularization and exile from religion. Women gained much greater access to birth control in the Griswold "girls world" decision in 1965.

The 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut ruled that the prohibition of contraception was unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated peoples' rights to marital privacy. In addition, in the 1960s and 1970s, the birth control movement advocated for the legalization of abortion and large scale education campaigns about contraception by governments. The Griswold v. Connecticut case and subsequent birth control movements created a precedent for later cases granting rights to birth control for unmarried couples (Eisenstadt v. Baird), 1972), rights to abortion for any woman (Roe v. Wade, 1973), and the right to contraception for juveniles (Carey v. Population Services International, 1977). The Griswold case was also influential in and cited as precedent for landmark cases dealing with the right to homosexual relations (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) and the right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015).
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