Today sponge
brand of plastic contraceptive sponge
The Today sponge is a brand of plastic contraceptive sponge saturated with a spermicide nonoxynol-9 to prevent conception. While initially popular in the 1980s in the United States, it is no longer commercially available as of 2019.
History
The Today sponge dates back to 1976 when it was created by Bruce Ward Vorhauer. Vorhauer struggled for seven years to get the device approved and on the market. Following U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, the brand was rolled out in June 1981. The product, manufactured by VLI Corp. of Irvine, California, was classified as "relatively safe" by the FDA in 1984. A 1984 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology compared it with the diaphragm and found that the Today sponge was a "safe and acceptable method of contraception with an effectiveness rate in the range of other vaginal contraceptives."
The Today sponge "was manufactured until 1995, when FDA imposed new manufacturing standards." The product had several setbacks while marketed, including a link to toxic shock syndrome. Personal financial problems forced Vorhauer to sell the entire manufacturing operation to American Home Products, now Wyeth. Almost the entire content of the facility was moved to the Whitehall-Robbins facility in Hammonton, New Jersey, from its original California home.
“Today sponge” enters the record as brand of plastic contraceptive sponge. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Today, sponge and brand can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7812225. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019, 1976, 1981 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Today sponge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.