Laura Kelly’s authoritative and insightful book examines the attitudes and experiences of Irish people towards contraception from c.1922 to the early 1990s. Legally banned in 1935, artificial methods of contraception were permitted to be sold, under restricted circumstances, in 1978. Since Kelly’s aim is to decentralise legal and political perspectives, she uses oral history to privilege the lived experience of Irish people and takes the narrative as far as the early 1990s to explore how much the 1978 legalisation actually transformed access to contraception. At the book’s core are the oral testimonies of 103 Irish men and women born before 1955 and 43 people involved in activism related to contraception. While early chapters explore knowledge and access to contraception up to the 1950s, it is in Kelly’s examination of contraception between the 1960s and the 1990s — and the 1970s in particular — that she makes her most insightful and original contribution to twentieth-century history. It is in 1960s and 1970s Ireland, when awareness about new methods of contraception was growing while access was still limited, that we see conflicts about birth control becoming most fraught, in public and private. While a deeply personal matter, contraception became bound up with the changing meanings of family, nationhood and modernity.

Following its introduction in 1961, the contraceptive pill became widely available in early-1960s US and Europe. Ireland was no exception; although contraception could not be legally sold, the pill could be prescribed as a ‘cycle regulator’. As such it was adopted as a family planning method by many Irish women, although access was uneven and depended on having an understanding doctor. While it was predominantly urban, middle-class women who initially adopted the pill, Kelly effectively demonstrates how this group showed agency and resistance to church, political and medical authority in seeking a prescription.

The 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae came as a surprise to the Catholic world, since it was widely expected that Pope Paul VI, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, would rule in favour of married Catholics using the pill. Laura Kelly’s exploration of the impact of Humanae Vitae on the Irish Catholic world offers fascinating insights into how both priests and lay Catholic men and women negotiated their faith after 1968. Many of her interviewees were already using the pill and saw no reason why, as faithful Catholics, they should not be permitted to space their children’s births or decide when their families were complete. Some women described how they ‘shopped around’ for a priest who would absolve them at confession (176), while others decided not to confess the use of contraception. Ann, who underwent tubal litigation in 1987, said that ‘I haven’t discussed it with a priest. I feel it is between me and Him’ (176). While there was little official flexibility, individual priests could be sympathetic to women who struggled with repeated pregnancies through poverty and ill health. Some struggled with the official Vatican line, reinforced by Archbishop McQuaid, and decided that it was not their place to judge. In pointing towards Humanae Vitae as the point when many Catholics began to consider whether contraception was a matter for private conscience or the priest, Kelly makes an important contribution to the history of religion, as well as to gender and social history, casting new light on the complexities of how both priests and lay Catholics negotiated the relationship between church, congregation and their faith.

There are three chapters devoted to activism around contraception, the first two respectively exploring family planning clinics and feminist activism in the 1970s and the third devoted to conservative activism against legal contraception. Based on interviews with activists, as well as the records of organisations and the media, these chapters offer crucial insights into the motivations of those who engaged in activism, as well as the considerable challenges — practical and social — that they faced. Connecting these chapters with the previous ones, there is a focus on the lived experience of activism, as well as the political and social impact of such work, while the chapter on conservative activism reveals the fears that drove these groups, as well as the international links they built in preparation for the anti-abortion activism of the 1980s. Kelly demonstrates that change was patchy and uneven, with access to contraception — as well as knowledge and demand — being higher among the urban middle classes. By the 1970s, there was a generational gulf too, and it was more often young women who were recently married or engaged who sought contraception in order to delay or space their pregnancies rather than those who already had large families.

Kelly makes it clear that the 1978 law legalising the sale of contraception in certain circumstances was a limited turning point. By keeping the spotlight on lived experience and the challenges of activism, she highlights how attitudes and practices were slower to change than the law, while the radical feminist edge of the 1970s was slowly blunted by the need for respectability, as doctors replaced activists in family planning clinics and the 1978 law reinforced the power of doctors and pharmacists by giving them sole power to prescribe and dispense contraceptives. At the same time, the rapid social changes that Ireland has undergone since the late 1990s are evidenced in the oral testimonies of those born before 1955, who, reflecting from a twenty-first-century perspective, emphasised fear and ignorance about sexuality in their upbringing and youth. In drawing out the lived experiences that often remain hidden in broader narratives of political and social history, Kelly’s careful research and fluent writing reveals that the history of contraception in Ireland is a rich and complex one filled with stories of resistance and hesitation, and the constant renegotiation of power: in bedrooms and doctors’ surgeries, in confessionals and on the streets.