Fallout Historical Speculation - Birth Control

[camwyn]

The reason I have to speculate about birth control in the pre-war Fallout universe is that having relatively cheap, significantly reliable, widely available contraception in a society without deadly/untreatable sexually transmitted diseases changes the consequences of sexual behavior. Doesn't matter if you think that's good, bad, indifferent, acceptable, or unacceptable. The simple fact is that if there is a means of preventing pregnancy that does not require immediate, deliberate action every single time a man and a woman have sex, it's gonna change things. Particularly if the worst thing that can happen to you once you're taking it is herpes or syphilis. Even if we assume that every single human being in pre-War Fallout America over the age of eighteen subscribed to exactly the same set of sexual mores and social expectations, if nothing else the teenagers would be grabbing for something like the Pill. They wouldn't necessarily be any good at using it reliably, but there'd be a market for it. And the existence of places like Gomorrah in Fallout New Vegas- which was advertising gambling and hot hot sexytiems with billboards of barely-clad ladies' bottoms and the name Gomorrah, for pete's sake, kind of implies that not everybody did subscribe to the exact same sexual mores.

So. Assume pre-War Fallout Americans were just as into sex as Americans in our world were in the 1950s. Assume that a market would have existed for a reliable not-deployed-at-sexytiems contraceptive for women. Given that in our world the legalization of the Pill in the United States (approved by the FDA in 1960) was very quickly followed by sharp rises in college attendance and college graduation rates for women, and that women began to be much more prevalent in the workforce after that, and what we've seen of the Fallout 'verse's pre-war women's roles, I don't think the Pill was ever developed there. I know it was under development as early as 1939 in our world, but hell, the transistor was first developed in our world in 1936 and it didn't show much in Fallout either- they're still using vacuum tubes in half their stuff. The divergence had earlier roots than post-WW II.

This is not to say that contraception wasn't available. We know condoms existed, and we know that there are condoms in use in some post-War areas, because if you're male in Fallout 2 and you don't have one in your inventory and you seduce a particular character, you wind up getting a post-game spiel about your exploits that includes the status of your son or daughter by that encounter. Given the number of houses that one can find in Fallout 3 that had children's toys and bedrooms but only one or two beds per room, I am inclined to believe that condom use was considered acceptable and that other forms of contraception that may have existed would have been either the woman's responsibility to deploy in advance of actual sex- e.g., diaphragms with or without spermicide - or used but looked upon with some suspicion because of possible consequences, e.g., non-hormonal IUDs. The Lippes Loop IUD was developed and became moderately widespread in the late 1950s. It would not violate the general feel of the Fifties setting for it to be considered socially okay for a married woman to have one of these after the appropriate number of children, and since robots didn't become prevalent for household domestic tasks until after about 2060, it would not have resulted in mass liberation of women from domestic chores the way the availability of the Pill for unmarried women would have done.

Long story short: I don't think hormonal birth control ever developed in the Fallout 'verse. Fiftiesesque society would not have survived in recognizable form if it did.