<P> The first permanent birth - control clinic was established in Britain in 1921 by Marie Stopes working with the Malthusian League . The clinic, run by midwives and supported by visiting doctors, offered women's birth - control advice and taught them the use of a cervical cap . Her clinic made contraception acceptable during the 1920s by presenting it in scientific terms . In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America . In 1924 the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics was founded to campaign for municipal clinics; this led to the opening of a second clinic in Greengate, Salford in 1926 . Throughout the 1920s, Stopes and other feminist pioneers, including Dora Russell and Stella Browne, played a major role in breaking down taboos about sex . In April 1930 the Birth Control Conference assembled 700 delegates and was successful in bringing birth control and abortion into the political sphere--three months later, the Ministry of Health, in the United Kingdom, allowed local authorities to give birth - control advice in welfare centres . </P> <P> In 1936 the U.S. court ruled in U.S. v. One Package that medically prescribing contraception to save a person's life or well - being was not illegal under the Comstock Law; following this decision, the American Medical Association Committee on Contraception revoked its 1936 statement condemning birth control . A national survey in 1937 showed 71 percent of the adult population supported the use of contraception . By 1938 347 birth control clinics were running in the United States despite their advertisement still being illegal . First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly supported birth control and family planning . In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson started endorsing public funding for family planning services, and the Federal Government began subsidizing birth control services for low - income families . The Affordable Care Act, passed into law on March 23, 2010 under President Barack Obama, requires all plans in the Health Insurance Marketplace to cover contraceptive methods . These include barrier methods, hormonal methods, implanted devices, emergency contraceptives, and sterilization procedures . </P> <P> In 1909, Richard Richter developed the first intrauterine device made from silkworm gut, which was further developed and marketed in Germany by Ernst Gräfenberg in the late 1920s . In 1951, a chemist, named Carl Djerassi from Mexico City made the hormones in progesterone pills using Mexican yams . Djerassi had chemically created the pill but was not equipped to distribute it to patients . Meanwhile, Gregory Pincus and John Rock with help from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America developed the first birth control pills in the 1950s, such as mestranol / noretynodrel, which became publicly available in the 1960s through the Food and Drug Administration under the name Enovid . Medical abortion became an alternative to surgical abortion with the availability of prostaglandin analogs in the 1970s and mifepristone in the 1980s . </P> <P> Human rights agreements require most governments to provide family planning and contraceptive information and services . These include the requirement to create a national plan for family planning services, remove laws that limit access to family planning, ensure that a wide variety of safe and effective birth control methods are available including emergency contraceptives, make sure there are appropriately trained healthcare providers and facilities at an affordable price, and create a process to review the programs implemented . If governments fail to do the above it may put them in breach of binding international treaty obligations . </P>

When was the birth control pill made available