WW1 was a drop in the bucket of self-murder....abortion. Began with 1931 contraception made possible by WW1 error.
Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, the first American birth-control manual, went through dozens of editions after its publication in 1832. Among married couples in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest, abortion became so widely practiced that doctors estimated one in three pregnancies was ending in abortion, obtained through both surgeries and mail-order abortifacient drugs. Lecturers gave talks on family limitation; as April Haynes shows in her book Riotous Flesh, women in Northeastern towns and cities formed “physiological societies” to share information about sexuality, pregnancy and childbirth (though their curriculum included stern warnings about the dangers of masturbation). Many women viewed this as part of their broader campaign for women’s rights.
Two events in the 1870s sharply curtailed such open conversations. First, suffrage activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton made a temporary but ill-fated alliance with glamorous “free love” advocate Victoria Woodhull during her moment of national celebrity in the 1870s. Stanton, in particular, was smitten by Woodhull’s bold libertarian attack on marriage. “Governments,” Woodhull declared, “might just as well assume to determine how people shall exercise their right to think…as to assume to determine that they shall not love, or how they may love, or that they shall love.” She topped this with a ringing declaration of her own sexual freedom: “Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may… ; to change that love every day if I please, and…neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”