Short answers, pulled from the story.
Birth control, also known as contraception, is the use of methods or devices to prevent pregnancy. The main categories are barrier methods, hormonal birth control, intrauterine devices, sterilization, and behavioral methods. Planning and using birth control is called family planning.
The most effective methods are long-acting and require no ongoing health care visits: surgical sterilization, implantable hormones, and intrauterine devices, all with first-year failure rates below 1%. The implant has the lowest failure rate at 0.05%. For emergency contraception, copper IUDs are the most effective, preventing about 99% of pregnancies after unprotected sex.
Margaret Sanger and Otto Bobsein popularised the phrase birth control in 1914. Sanger opened a short-lived clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 and founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Gregory Pincus and John Rock developed the first birth control pills in the 1950s, which became publicly available in the 1960s under the name Enovid. The first human trials were done on patients at the Worcester State Psychiatric Hospital, followed by clinical testing in Puerto Rico.
Male condoms have a typical-use first-year failure rate of 18% and a perfect-use rate of 2%. Condoms are the most common method of birth control globally and also help prevent some sexually transmitted infections such as HIV/AIDS, though condoms made from animal intestines do not.
Birth control use in developing countries has decreased deaths around the time of pregnancy by 40%, preventing about 270,000 deaths in 2008. It could prevent 70% of such deaths if the full demand for birth control were met.
The Egyptian Ebers Papyrus from 1550 BC and the Kahun Papyrus from 1850 BC describe using honey, acacia leaves, and lint placed in the vagina to block sperm. Silphium, a giant fennel from north Africa, may have been used in ancient Greece and the ancient Near East before it became extinct in late antiquity.
Opill is the first daily oral nonprescription over-the-counter birth control pill in the United States, approved by the FDA on the 13th of July 2023. It is manufactured by Perrigo, a pharmaceutical company based in Dublin, and was expected to be available in 2024.