Regulating reproduction has involved far more than the law, but modern legal systems defined the bourgeois family and brought reproduction within an official framework, while disciplinary norms have operated in part through formal regulation. This chapter reviews some roles of law in reproduction since around 1800, mainly for the United Kingdom and the United States with their emphasis—influential through the British Empire—on common law rather than civil codes. With the focus on contraception, sterilization and abortion, on the one hand, and assisted conception, on the other, we review the expansion of the state and the medical profession into the market, especially through nineteenth-century anti-abortion and obscenity legislation, notably the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Comstock laws; the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those leading to the 1967 Abortion Act and Roe v. Wade (1973), that critiqued state control and medical authority, but also drew on agendas for change within the professions and sometimes strengthened medical power; and the rise of arms-length regulation of in vitro fertilization, donor insemination and other techniques of assisted conception, notably through the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority—in marked contrast to the largely unregulated US.