In the last 100 years, there has been amazing progress made with birth control techniques, but the battle to make these available to all women was an ongoing one up until very recently.

It is now difficult for many of us to imagine a world where birth control isn’t available to everyone, but there was a time when access to birth control was highly restricted.

It’s been just over 100 years since Margaret Sanger coined the term birth control, and it was Sanger who opened the first birth control clinic in 1916.

Even with her extensive efforts to create a birth control pill for women, contraception wasn’t made readily available to married couples until a landmark ruling in a 1965 court case. Unmarried women had to wait until 1972 to have official access to the birth control, when a case deemed it was unconstitutional to prohibit the sale of contraceptives to unmarried women.

More recently, President Barack Obama has given free access to birth control under ObamaCare, with 30 million women benefiting, but even with these measures in place some women still struggle to access free birth control.

This timeline from A Touch of Class Companions takes you through 100 years of birth control and outlines all the important milestones along the way.

Relephant Reads:

Mindful Birth Control: Why I Chose an IUD.

Mindful Birth Control: Why I Chose to Remove my IUD.

Author: Keri Brown

Editor: Emily Bartran

Photo: Raymond Bryson via Flickr/Infographic: Author’s Own