Contraceptive Advertising and Fertility Decline in the United States, 1840-1923

Nicola Barban, University of Bologna
Maria Ludovica Isani, University of Bologna
Elisabetta De Cao, University of Bologna
Luca Bagnato, University of Bologna

Did the diffusion of contraceptive information through newspapers contribute to the fertility decline in the United States during the nineteenth century? We combine article-level historical newspaper data from the American Stories corpus with county-level demographic outcomes from historical U.S. Census records to estimate the causal effect of contraceptive advertising on fertility. Using a dictionary of over 200 OCR-robust regular expressions and large language model classification, we identify more than 54,000 contraceptive advertisements and 45,000 fertility-related articles published in U.S. newspapers between 1840 and 1923. We exploit telegraph access in 1852 as an instrumental variable for local exposure to contraceptive advertising, leveraging the role of early information infrastructure in shaping the speed and reach of newspaper content diffusion across counties. Our results show that greater exposure to contraceptive advertising leads to a statistically significant reduction in fertility. We further document the impact of the Comstock Act of 1873 and related state laws on advertising patterns, including a measurable shift toward euphemistic language following legal restrictions.

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 Presented in Session 5. Fertility in Changing Contexts