While the notion that any pregnancy must be stoically accepted dominated in Europe until the eighteenth century, birth control spread during the nineteenth century and gradually became a common practice despite opposition from the Church and political authorities. It was actually seen as a means of upward mobility and from the 1960s increasingly as an instrument of freedom. Policies, which had for a long time condemned this evolution, ultimately adapted and contributed to it through the liberalization of contraception. Governments nevertheless remain divided in Europe, particularly with regard to the question of abortion
