Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 15 October 1880 to Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, a suffragist, and Henry Stopes, an archaeologist and anthropologist. A paleobotanist best known for her social activism in the area of sexuality, Stopes was a pioneer in the fight to gain sexual equality for women. Her activism took many forms including writing books and pamphlets, giving public appearances, serving on panels, and, most famously, co-founding the first birth control clinic in the United Kingdom.

In 1998, urologists Marc Goldstein, Philip Shihua Li, and Gerald J. Matthews published “Microsurgical Vasovasostomy: The Microdot Technique of Precision Suture Placement,” hereafter “The Microdot Technique,” in The Journal of Urology. The authors describe a novel technique for reversing a vasectomy, which blocks a patient’s flow of sperm, preventing the patient from fertilizing a partner’s egg. The technique relies on the placement of microscopic dots to guide the placement of the stitches that reconnect the vasa deferentia, which is a part of the male reproductive system. The authors, working from the Center for Male Reproduction and Microsurgery at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, New York, published the article to instruct surgeons on how to properly employ the surgical technique and provide data to indicate the technique’s effectiveness. Through the publication of “The Microdot Technique,” Goldstein, Li, and Matthews provide guidelines to conduct a more successful and accurate method of a vasovasostomy.

In 2012, Stephen Sidney, T. Craig Cheetham, Frederick A. Connell, and colleagues published “Recent Combined Hormonal Contraceptives (CHCs) and the Risk of Thromboembolism and Other Cardiovascular Events in New Users,” hereafter “Combined Hormonal Contraceptives” in Contraception. The authors gathered records of major cardiovascular events in patients who were using combined hormonal contraceptive treatments, or CHCs. A CHC is a birth control medication that contains both estrogen and progestin hormones. The CHCs of focus, which the authors referred to as the study CHCs, included a pill, patch, and vaginal ring that the US Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, recently approved at the time of publication. The researchers compared the rates of cardiovascular events between users of the study CHCs to users of established CHCs to find any increased cardiovascular risk. “Combined Hormonal Contraceptives” showed that the study CHCs did come with some increased cardiovascular risk, and reconfirmed the known cardiovascular risks of CHCs in general, providing safety information for people who may want to start birth control.

On 22 March 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, hereafter Eisenstadt, the United States Supreme Court determined, in a six to one decision, that unmarried individuals have the same right to access contraceptives as married couples. Eisenstadt involved William Baird, a reproductive rights advocate who intentionally broke Massachusetts law in 1967 by giving a speech about birth control at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts, and giving an unmarried, nineteen-year-old woman contraceptives. Baird argued that laws against unmarried people accessing contraceptives unfairly discriminated against unmarried people and denied them reproductive autonomy. Massachusetts law, however, stated that contraceptives could only be distributed by medical professions to married people. The case followed a similar legal challenge from 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut, hereafter Griswold, which found that married individuals have the right to access contraceptives based on a constitutional right to privacy in the US. Eisenstadt reinforced the constitutional right to privacy and equalized the accessibility to contraceptives for married and single individuals.