I’m interested on the difference in cultural views on sex in the Victorian Era and so I thought Google Ngram’s would help me find an answer to that. (I know this is redundant but for the comparisons of data purposes but,) in our day and age, abortion is fully legal and is done quite frequently but is still a hot topic. The split on whether it’s moral or not is what causes tension against it. But as for birth control, condoms or general contraception, it is highly recognized and appreciated. Although in some cases and in some specific areas, if a woman is on birth control she’s predicted to get around a lot, or if a married woman is using birth control there’s something wrong because she should be having children. But from what I can tell of the graph it’s very different.

The most activity is from abortion, which from what I read has been a well known practice for many centuries.  But the Catholic church denounced it and condemned it as a sin. So that made it a taboo subject, and illegal in many Christian nations for a while, including the British Empire in the 1800-1900s (Joffe). What I’m interested in is why the spark in the late 1840s? What made the word come up more? My thoughts are that it became a serious topic of discussion then. But what’s interesting is that although there is not a lot of activity for the words condom, birth control and contraception, they all do spark up around the same time, which leads me to believe that the beginning of typical and most importantly safe,  birth control was starting to make it’ debut in this time period (Hanson). As for condoms, they were the most popular of the contraceptives, and were promoted quite often after sexually transmitted diseases were spread in the after mass of the American Civil War, and England followed suit. What was encouraged often was DIY condoms, which came with instruction manuals (Collier).

But what is most interesting of this graph is that when the contraceptives spark, the abortion line goes down, and I’m sure if the graph were to continue from 1800-2000, the line would have gradually declined. It’s really interesting to see how it worked out like that.

(Apparently this is a Victorian postcard satirizing birth control)

http://www.booktraces.org/book-submission-green-fields-and-running-brooks/

Works Cited

Collier, Aine (2007). The Humble Little Condom: A History. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-59102-556-6.

Hanson, S.J.; Burke, Anne E. (21 December 2010). “Fertility control: contraception, sterilization, and abortion”. In Hurt, K. Joseph; Guile, Matthew W.; Bienstock, Jessica L.; Fox, Harold E.; Wallach, Edward E. The Johns Hopkins manual of gynecology and obstetrics (4th ed.). Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. pp. 382–395. ISBN 978-1-60547-433-5.

Joffe, Carole (2009). “1. Abortion and medicine: A sociopolitical history”. In M Paul, ES Lichtenberg, L Borgatta, DA Grimes, PG Stubblefield, MD Creinin. Management of Unintended and Abnormal Pregnancy (PDF) (1st ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBN 978-1-4443-1293-5. Archived from the original on 21 October 2011.