When historian Samira K. Mehta began researching the history of religion and birth control in the United States, she thought she knew roughly what she would find.
The familiar history of contraception often centers feminist activists who fought to make birth control legal and accessible. Mehta assumed there would be a parallel religious story: the predecessors of groups such as Catholics for Choice and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice making the case for contraception from within their faith traditions.
Instead, she found something more complicated.
As Mehta discovered, religious support helped transform birth control from a cause associated with radicals such as anarchist Emma Goldman into an increasingly mainstream part of American family life. But the clergy advocating contraception—“almost exclusively men,” Mehta says—weren’t generally interested in women’s liberation. They were interested in a very specific vision of the American family: a husband, a wife, 2.4 kids, and a white picket fence in the suburbs.
Religious leaders argued that contraception could produce stronger, happier families: Mothers would be healthier if pregnancies could be spaced; parents wouldn’t be financially strained by more children than they could support; and married couples could have active sex lives without either unwanted pregnancies or the extended periods of abstinence required by the rhythm method. A satisfying sex life, they hoped, might even help reduce divorce. As Mehta puts it, these religious arguments amounted to a “domestication of birth control.”
For Catholics, that history is particularly complicated. Even as church teaching increasingly drew a firm line against artificial contraception, Catholic clergy, theologians, and laypeople were participating in a broader American debate about what responsible parenthood required and whether contraception might strengthen rather than undermine family life. Those tensions would become impossible to ignore after the arrival of the pill and, eventually, Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (On the Regulation of Birth).
In her new book, God Bless the Pill (The University of North Carolina Press), Mehta traces how Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Americans navigated contraception amid enormous social and technological changes. By the 1950s and ’60s, debates about family planning were entangled not only with changing ideas about sex and marriage but also with Cold War capitalism, fears of overpopulation, and assumptions about race, gender, and class.
That history resists an easy division between progressives and conservatives. Religious support helped make contraception more accessible, but it could also reinforce patriarchal ideas about women’s proper place in the home. Concerns about population growth reflected widely accepted scientific thinking of the period while also being, as Mehta says, “shot through” with racism and colonialism. And the contraceptive technologies that some religious leaders hoped would stabilize the traditional family would ultimately give women greater power to challenge it.
Is the debate over birth control as simple as we often assume?
This is a story with so much gray area. In the mid-20th century, on the pro-feminist birth control side was also eugenics. Many pro-birth control Protestant clergy were, by and large, freedom riders. They were trying not to be racist and were opposed to state-sanctioned contraception. But there were also plenty of “good” Protestant Christians who implemented eugenic programs on Native American reservations in the American South.
The narrative from white progressive Protestant clergy was about population control anxiety—the idea that you should not have more kids than you can afford, but even if you can afford it, you shouldn’t have more than three or four because you should be thinking about what it means to be a good steward of the Earth.
When people talked about birth control, they didn’t show large American families; they showed pictures of starving children in Africa and India and Latin America. They argued that these people had the right to the same standard of living that they had in the industrialized West and that the problem wasn’t, for example, extraction colonialism, but rather that they didn’t have access to birth control.
The Catholic Church, meanwhile, expressed skepticism about eugenics and race-based ideas about population control. The church said, “Instead of giving people access to birth control, we could work on feeding the poor or thinking about extraction colonialism in general.”
How did this tension play out in real life?
The birth control pill was initially the work of Gregory Pincus and John Rock. Rock became the poster child for the birth control pill, because he was a relatively conservative Catholic family man who believed that the Catholic Church would eventually approve the birth control pill.
The two conducted their first medical tests in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts tests were pretty sketchy, because while Rock did some tests with volunteers, Pincus did tests on inmates in an asylum in Worchester. They didn’t get any benefit from it, and they didn’t have a lot of agency to say, “No.”
Then, the research moved to Puerto Rico, in part because Pincus and Rock thought that the poverty and high birth rates meant that women would be interested in signing up for these studies. Detractors argue that they also knew people would have less power if things went wrong and that they’d be more willing to accept difficult side effects.
The studies met the ethical protocols of the time. But in the 1950s, the ethical protocols were a lot different than they are now in terms of things like informed consent.
And there were severe side effects. They were giving these women huge doses of the pill, not because they didn’t care about the side effects, but because they legitimately didn’t know how high the dose needed to be to work. As word got around, women dropped out of the study and it got harder to find volunteers.
There are arguments that people were coerced. In certain ways, that’s true: Rock and Pincus went to a place where there was economic deprivation. But in other ways, people stopped volunteering, so they weren’t coerced in the way that the Worchester inmates were.
There was a lot of objection to the trials from the start in Puerto Rico, and a lot of that came from the Catholic Church. The church made some valid class-based arguments. But they were also influenced by Puerto Rican men, some of whom saw it as a disruption of the patriarchal order. So the church sided both with the poor and with the patriarchy.
The white women who worked on these studies cared deeply for the women they worked with and their health and experience. They also felt that it was even more important for Puerto Rican women to have smaller families than middle-class and wealthy white people in the United States; these racist ideas are braided in.
So the pro-birth control side at the time had ideas that we might think of as feminist and laudable, but it was also kind of racist and gross. And on the Catholic side, there was concern for the poor and for the racial politics of what is going on, but there was also a concern to uphold the patriarchal order. It’s just really complicated.
What conversations were already happening in the Catholic Church decades before Humanae Vitae was published in 1968?
In 1930, the Anglican Communion issued its first clearly pro-birth control statement. They were a little skeptical, but they basically say: “There are situations in which this is permitted and appropriate. It would be better not to use it, but there are times when it’s acceptable.”
The Catholic response, Casti Connubii (On Christian Marriage), hits the press New Year’s Day 1931. It says: “No. The Catholic Church says no to artificial contraception.” And, in 1930, artificial contraception is basically all existing contraception—diaphragms, IUDs, and condoms—except for what is called the rhythm method then and has been rebranded as natural family planning now.
The document does acknowledge that there are good and valid reasons people might want to limit their family size: maternal health, economic deprivation, concern for the Earth. It recommends periodic continence to do that: tracking your cycle and charting when you are statistically more and less likely to get pregnant.
The church also starts providing people with suggestions about how to do that. Some people assume the rhythm method was more primitive than the natural family planning methods people use today—that it assumed everyone was on the same 28-day cycle. But that is not true: In the middle of the 20th century, people were taking their temperatures, making charts, and checking cervical mucus. They were aware that some people have a 28-day cycle, some people have a 36-day cycle, and other people are completely irregular.
It is a myth to say that natural family planning is more scientific and more accurate than the rhythm method. What is true is that thermometers are better, and we have wearable devices that track our biometric data (and also are subpoenable if you are in Texas). It is less cumbersome to do now. You do not need to sit there with a mercury thermometer in a body cavity for four minutes every morning.
So the Catholic Church acknowledged from 1930 on that there are times when people might want to limit the number of children they have. And their response was: “You have to be open to whatever happens, but you can use these natural methods.”
Did the conversation change when the birth control pill was invented?
Rock was a devout Catholic. He attended Mass daily. He had a crucifix in his office. He had five children himself.
He wanted to treat infertility. He had heard about the massive pain and stress infertility places on marriages and families. There’s this theory that if you suppress ovulation for a while (which is how the pill works), then when you go off the pill, you’ll produce lots of eggs all at once. That’s not how it works, but it was an early attempt to stimulate ovulation before in vitro fertilization.
His logic was that the Catholic Church says that it is OK to have sex at times when you know you are hormonally less likely to conceive. You can have sex at infertile times in your cycle. You can have sex after menopause, or when you’re pregnant, or if you’ve had a hysterectomy for a non-contraceptive medical reason. The birth control pill mimics pregnancy and suppresses ovulation, so he thought it’s inducing a natural state and is therefore essentially a perfection of the rhythm method.
This is an idea that got support from notable Catholic theologians such as Hans Küng. And it had enough traction behind it that the Papal Commission on Birth Control was established from 1962 to 1966.
That period overlaps with the Second Vatican Council, and there are questions about why they did this. One theory is that they didn’t want the issue of birth control to totally derail Vatican II. Another is that they didn’t want birth control to become a political flashpoint during the Council. So the commission starts out small. But by the end, more than 70 people were on it, including a couple married women.
On this commission was a married couple named Pat and Patty Crowley, who were also copresidents of the Christian Family Movement, an organization for lay Catholic couples who were interested in fusing together their marriage and family life with their Catholicism. The Crowleys were also foster parents and have seen the struggles families have when they can’t care for their children.
They send out surveys to the entire movement on people’s beliefs about birth control. They get about 3,000 responses back—most from the United States, although there are some Québécois responses and some other international ones.
A minority of the surveys say things like, “You cannot change a moral prescription of the church,” which is particularly funny to me because Vatican II just happened. There are people who say, “We have used the rhythm method, and it’s been really good for us to develop parts of our marriage that are not about sex.”
There are people who say, “It has worked for us,” and these tend to take one of two perspectives. Some say that it has been hard, but overall a good experience and they have roughly the number of children that they wanted. The other people who feel good about it are people who have far more children than they would’ve planned, but there has been no disaster because of it.
Many more people express an interest in contraception in some way, shape, or form.
Some people say, “We in the United States, because of the prosperousness of this country, do not need contraception because God provides for us. Those people in other parts of the world that are poor, and incidentally often not white, they need it. It’s not fair to ask them to live these much more disciplined sexual lives and watch their kids go hungry.” There might also be an implication that those non-white people are less good at discipline. There are some racist comments.
And then there are other people who talk about the rhythm method not working for them. They don’t have more kids than they wanted or can support, but it is a terrible experience for them. They talk about how hard it is to be abstinent two weeks of the month. They talk about not being able to hold hands or sit next to each other on the couch for fear of starting something. They talk about the anxiety that bleeds when your period is late or your breasts are tender and the fear of pregnancy and the way that makes you a worse spouse and a worse parent. They argue that it’s undermining the Christian family to not have contraception.
There are other people who talk about Catholic theology that says that the marital bond doesn’t just mean having babies: It’s in the marital bond that we best emulate Christ’s love for the church. They talk about not therefore being able to emulate Christ because the strain of the constant possibility of pregnancy means that they’re almost never having sex. They talk about the horror of not being able to feed their children. One woman says she has five children who were all born with cleft palates.
And there are lots of people who agree with Rock. They don’t advocate for condoms or diaphragms, but they say the pill seems in line with Catholic teaching.
The other thing that people say is that different priests have different attitudes toward contraception. Lots of people say that when they asked their priest about using birth control, he told them, “Yes.” Other people say, “The priest two towns over says, ‘Yes,’ and my priest says, ‘No,’ and this is not fair and not right.”
So there were priests who were saying yes, there were priests who were saying no, and there were priests who were saying use individual conscience. And people felt like there should be clarity. The rules shouldn’t change when you go to a different parish. The people were frustrated.
You write that by the ’60s, many people were hopeful that the church would eventually approve the pill. What gave people that hope?
The pope gave a speech to Italian midwives and basically said, “We understand that both for reasons tied to what’s best for an individual family and also for reasons tied to what might be best for the planet, there might be reasons why you would want to limit the number of children you have. And it’s possible technology will develop that will be in accordance with church teaching.” There were also a number of theologians in the United States and Europe who said the pill seems like it would be morally acceptable.
Two years before Humanae Vitae, the Papal Commission on Birth Control concluded 80-to-20 to approve the pill. And then in 1968, the word came down that the pill is not acceptable, which turns out to be a real breaking point for the church.
How so?
Andrew Greeley, a Catholic priest and sociologist of American Catholicism—and mystery novelist—said that before Humanae Vitae priests told people to wait to use birth control until it was inevitably approved. Then after the encyclical, they started saying, “Use your conscience.”
Before Humanae Vitae, the number of priests who say you can use contraception is fairly small. This number goes up dramatically after the document. The number of priests who say that they will bar someone from communion for using contraception plummets.
Younger priests were dramatically in favor of people using contraception. Leslie Woodcock Tentler suggests that the people making these decisions in the Vatican were not the people doing pastoral care in congregations. They were not the people watching what it does to people when they have their third kid with cystic fibrosis. They were not watching what happens to people when they earn too much money to get financial aid but have one too many kids to pay for college.
Dan Savage, the sex advice columnist, is one of four kids, all of whom were born within the first several years of his parents’ marriage. He talks about his mother going to the priest and saying, “I’m pregnant again,” and the priest tells her, “The Catholic Church is not in the end going to feed or educate your children. You need to make the best decisions for your children, and you need to decide whether the Catholic Church can tell you what to do if they’re not going to help you.”
What should we take away from the history of Catholicism and birth control?
There’s no black and white. If you are someone who sees the birth control movement as a wonderful feminist movement, it’s important that you know that proponents of birth control were saying harmful things about eugenics, class, and capitalism.
If you think the birth control movement is horrible, and Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist monster, know that without people like her and without some of the support of the eugenics movement, feminist gains would not have been possible.
The Catholic Church often fights for the poor and fights for upholding patriarchal structures. There are no morally pure actors. There’s no clear triumphalist narrative. There’s no one who’s unambiguously right or wrong.
If you want a world in which women have full bodily autonomy and where we care for the poor and create structures where women have choices and don’t have to drop out of college if they get pregnant, then you’re building on a movement that has actors in it that have done things you don’t like, and you need to, therefore, rigorously interrogate your received history to make sure that you’re not accidentally replicating the ramifications of their mistakes. You have to think about how to bend more strongly and more quickly toward justice.
And if you’re somebody who believes in the sanctity of life and that the sanctity of life includes an anti-birth control and anti-choice agenda, then you need to grapple with the need to feed the children that result. If you say, “This stance doesn’t discriminate against women,” you need to acknowledge that the anti-birth control and anti-choice movements came out of some horrible gender politics and a history of being more concerned with the fetus than the feeding of the children.
And everybody on every side needs to think about how to create a more just world.
This article also appears in the November 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 11, pages 24-28). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash
