In God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (UNC Press, Apr.), Samira Mehta, a religion scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder, upends the perception that all religious leaders have historically opposed birth control. In fact, she argues, in the 1940s and '50s there were numerous liberal clergy who actively promoted contraception as a tool to support strong, stable families.
“There’s no better time for this book than now,” says Cate Hodorowicz, editor at University of North Carolina Press. “With the reversal of Roe v. Wade and a barrage of legislation that tries and sometime succeeds to block women’s access to contraception, it’s crucial that we understand why and how birth control improves women’s lives, and the lives of their families. Not so long ago, religious leaders not only knew this, but they supported it, too.”
PW talked with Mehta about faith, contraception, and the pendulum swing of the last half century.
How did you come to write God Bless the Pill?
I've juggled my academic career with different kinds of women's health advocacy. Birth control seemed like an interesting place to explore questions of religion and the American family.
What did you find about Planned Parenthood appealing to clergy to support birth control in the 1940s?
They tried to reshape birth control’s reputation into a tool that moral, religious Christians and Jews would use to create their families. Contraception wasn’t about “controlling birth” so you can have consequence-free sex. It was about carefully planning out parenthood so families could be upwardly mobile.
What is an example of religious leaders influencing access to contraception?
In 1958, birth control was legal in New York State, but not available in New York City public hospitals. A Jewish doctor tried to fit a diabetic Protestant mother for a diaphragm, afraid that another pregnancy would endanger her life. The New York City Hospital Commissioner, a Jewish doctor appointed by the Catholic mayor, denied permission for the diaphragm. Her doctor called the New York Times, which launched a months-long campaign. My favorite headline was, “Harlem Pastors Association and Orthodox Rabbinical Assembly Condemn [Hospital Commissioner] Jacobs.” They publicly humiliated the New York City hospital system from pulpits and in the press. The hospital system changed its policy, and birth control became available.
That sounds like a huge win.
It was a win. But the hospital policy was more conservative than what the clergy wanted. They said you can't access birth control except if it's medically necessary. Hospitals would not provide birth control to women who were getting married and wanted to be married for two years before having their first baby—something that was absolutely available to wealthy women going to private doctors.
Clergy support faded in the 1970s. Why so?
Clergymen cared about women as mothers. They were worried about women dying from excessive childbearing because they felt step-parent families were less stable. They worried about rising divorce rates and saw birth control as a way couples could have sexually dynamic marriages, which they hoped would keep marriages together. I thought those liberal Protestant and Jewish voices would have hints of feminism in them. But in fact, they sound like people advocating for traditional family values.
What is the role of the American Catholic Church in this story?
In the 1970s, the Catholic priest, sociologist, and novelist Andrew Greeley argued that Humanae Vitae—the 1968 papal encyclical in which the Catholic Church said “absolutely not” to contraception, including the pill—is the moment when the Catholic Church lost its ability to be a meaningful voice about sexual morality to American Catholics. Prior to Humanae Vitae, most Catholic priests held the Church’s party line. After the encyclical, priests stopped denying people communion and started talking about the right of conscience, and Catholic people increasingly exercised the right of conscience on birth control.
What prompted the shift towards the religiously conservative view of contraception since the 1980s?
People who did so much heavy lifting to make birth control available weren't anticipating the wonderful uses [for contraception] that feminists were going to come up with, like women not going to college just to be good, educated mothers, but to enter professions. In a pendulum swing, birth control then got blamed as being something that actually hurts the American family. And today we see a huge push for women to be home raising children, to be “tradwives.”
