Don’t you just love a good glass of onion juice? Or a glass of water with a dash of lead in it? How about some beaver testicles ground up and swizzled into moonshine? This isn’t some hipster cocktail menu; these are some of the contraceptives women used to imbibe in order to control the number of children they had, when and whether they had them.

The longstanding contraceptive drama women have faced through the ages came to light recently in a video made by Engender Health, a non-profit that focuses its efforts on improving reproductive health around the world. It drew attention to the long and creative list of oral and barrier method contraceptives that women have historically used. What it doesn’t tell you is that the (admittedly horrifying) examples it offers are just a mere sampling.

Aside from the onion juice, beaver testicles, and poisonous lead water, women in ancient North Africa drank the foam that dripped from a camel’s mouth, or the water that the deceased were washed in. (Gag reflex: initiated). These all belonged to a class of ingredients known as abortifacients—things that were believed to induce abortion. Add to that list a paste of crushed ants, animal hairs soaked in fat, and as recently as the last couple of hundred years, shots of pure turpentine, or quinine water containing a rusty nail.

But if we’re awarding prizes for medical horror here, this category of consumed ‘contraceptives’ faces stiff competition from the kind women stuck up themselves—not to put too fine a point on it. Apparently, way back in Ancient Greece, smarty-pants Aristotle suggested the use of olive oil, cedar resin, or a mixture of the two, as a kind of vaginal balm that would deter sperm. There was also tobacco, lemon juice, and beeswax to choose from. Awkward as it may have been, all this sounds like soothing aromatherapy compared with some of the other options available to women at the time.

Take the range of ‘pessaries’: these were items and pastes you could insert to block the entrance to the uterus so that sperm couldn’t get in. Women used everything from crocodile or elephant dung mixed with honey, to pebbles that formed a plug.

At one point women began using pessaries made not of dung, but wedges of cloth or sponge, infused with ingredients they believed had spermicidal qualities—like wine, oils, fat, lemon juice, and a host of other things you’d usually cook with—and then tied up with thread for easy extraction.

And the ages move on, we start to see some of our modern-day contraceptives appearing in their much more rudimentary form. If in Medieval Europe you had a few animal bladders lying around, you counted yourself lucky because suddenly you had a condom! Apparently, goat and pig bladders made a great internal sheath. At another point in history, someone was eating a pomegranate and thought it would just make the best ever diaphragm (the tale probably went something like that anyway). Pomegranates, halved, insides scooped out, and inverted, provided the perfect cap-shaped covering for the cervix, as did a halved lemon.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that modern science caught up with the massive need for effective contraception, and women finally got the Pill. (Although even as late as the 60s, women used disastrous contraceptives. Take the infamous Coke douche: women would shake up a bottle of Coca-Cola, flip off the cap, stick it you-know-where, hoping that the fizzy, acidic concoction would kill unwanted sperm and protect them against pregnancy. Coke does, in fact, have spermicidal qualities, but it’s hardly reliable and makes a massive mess so, people, do not try this at home.)

But even in the face of the highly effective birth control pill, it wouldn’t be fair to completely discount all the contraceptive measures history served up to women: some were surprisingly effective. Ingredients with acidic qualities did work partly as spermicides, and parts of certain plants—like the seeds inside pomegranates—were found to have preventative effects. Even as recently as the early 1900s, a birth control activist called Marie Stopes found that of 2,000 women who inserted olive oil-soaked sponges to prevent pregnancy, none fell pregnant unintentionally—so maybe Aristotle was onto something all those centuries ago.

But the bigger point Engender Health makes in their striking video is that despite the awful fact that these methods were once a reality for women around the world, a potentially worse fact is that there are still 220 million women worldwide who want contraceptives but face a total lack of them. It’s important to remember that—even as we try to forget all that camel spit and crocodile dung.