Shock of the old: 11 agonising and awful contraceptives

Fear of pregnancy is as old as time, as are half-baked attempts at preventing conception. Read on if you dare

The more I think about contraception, the angrier I get, which is definitely the ideal state in which to compile a lighthearted review of its most outre visual history. But it’s all so unfair! Thousands of years of mansplaining, hypocrisy and manufactured moral outrage, resulting in a desperate story of death, injury, pain and poverty. It’s enough to put anyone into a terrible mood, plus my exploratory research threw up images I would not wish on my worst enemy. (Etsy chastity belts, I’m looking at you. Well, I’m not looking at you now and I wish I never had.)

Of course, people were trying everything they could think of to prevent pregnancy even before they had the dimmest understanding of how it came about. There was stuff you consumed, from “blacksmith water” – deliciously fortified with lead – to equally poisonous mercury. The Romans liked silphium, a now-extinct relative of giant fennel, so much so that it was celebrated on coins, while pennyroyal was recommended by the ancient Greek doctor Dioscorides and still sold as “relief for ladies” into the 20th century.

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