Review of God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion by Samira K. Mehta (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

---

Reflecting on the controversy surrounding her 1969 exposé, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, Barbara Seaman recalled that her early critics had two main lines of attack. First, they assumed that she must have had an unpleasant personal experience with oral contraception and was writing a book about its side effects to “get even.” She had not; Seaman never used the pill herself. Second, and perhaps more damning, was the charge that she was a Catholic, criticizing the pill as though she was “working for the Pope.” She was not; like many leaders of the women’s health movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, Seaman was Jewish.^[1]

Then as now, discussions of religion and birth control in the postwar United States almost inevitably return to Catholicism. There was Dr. John Rock, the good Catholic boy who helped develop and champion the pill. Then, in 1968, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae vitae, definitively reaffirming the Catholic Church’s opposition to artificial contraception – and shaping the reception of Seaman’s book the following year. Historians of health and sexuality, therefore, can be forgiven for confessing that their understanding of religion and birth control remains largely confined to this familiar Catholic-centric framework. In God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion, however, Samira K. Mehta reframes this canon entirely.

God Bless the Pill delivers a historiographical reformation. Mehta begins not with the religious opponents of contraception we already know so well, but rather with the much less familiar story of the religious people who thought birth control was actually a good idea. Across the middle decades of the twentieth century, liberal Protestants, Jews, and even some Catholics came to embrace family planning as a tool for building stronger marriages and healthier families. Contraception, in this telling, was not necessarily a threat to traditional family life. It was the opposite: if couples could choose when to have children and how many to have, they might have more money, less marital strain, and happier, more spiritually fulfilled families. What was not to like?

Quite a bit, as it turned out. But not necessarily for the reasons we might expect. The world of responsible parenthood promotion that Mehta reconstructs was not exactly a feminist utopia. Its advocates tended to imagine fairly conventional husbands and wives living fairly conventional married lives, and their ideas about who should reproduce, how often, and under what circumstances were entangled with assumptions about gender, race, class, religion, and American prosperity. Acceptance of contraception did not necessarily imply sexual liberation, much less feminism. Sometimes birth control was attractive precisely because people believed it could shore up the institutions that later generations would use it to escape or remake.

My favorite chapter is the first, “The Diaphragm Debates,” in part because Mehta takes the diaphragm seriously as an actual material thing. This sounds obvious, but histories of sexuality can sometimes move so quickly toward what contraceptives mean culturally that the technologies themselves nearly disappear. Diaphragms had to be obtained from literal contraceptive gatekeepers. (Thanks, Margaret Sanger!) They had to be fitted. They cost money. Someone had to teach women how to use them, and then women had to actually use them. All of this mattered enormously if you were a religious leader, physician, or married couple trying to translate an abstract theological position on birth control into the rather more awkward realities of preventing a pregnancy. Historians of reproductive health will find much to appreciate in this chapter. Mehta’s attention to these logistical details is especially illuminating alongside her discussion of eugenic judgments of users’ reproductive fitness. Taken together, the chapter reminds us that the history of contraception happens not only in encyclicals, court decisions, and theological debates, but also in bodies, bedrooms, clinics, and conversations between doctors and patients.

From there, Mehta shows in chapter 2 how family planning – which now included the oral contraceptive pill but also, in some circles, the “rhythm” method – became part of a much larger postwar vision of the good life, American style. She traces an emerging consensus among religious communities and leaders that allowing couples to space pregnancies, nurture companionate marriages, and raise only the number of children they could properly support was naturally compatible with their broader moral and spiritual beliefs. It also fit remarkably comfortably within a world of postwar domesticity, Cold War capitalist prosperity, and upward mobility. But, of course, the “American family” invoked in these discussions was never a neutral category. The very language that made contraception attractive to respectable middle-class families could take on rather different implications when applied across lines of race and class.

That tension takes Mehta into chapter 3’s territory of the “human family” via population, race, reproductive politics, and the increasingly global ambitions of family planning. Moving from the intimate calculations of individual married couples to debates about populations changes the scale of the story dramatically. Ideas about responsible parenthood could sound benign, even humane, at the level of a single household or even a congregation. But they become considerably more complicated when large institutions begin deciding which communities have too many children or which populations ought to be encouraged to reproduce differently. While this is previewed in the earlier chapters, Mehta opens up a conversation here that could easily sustain its own book.

And then comes the heel turn in the final chapter. The religious embrace of contraception depended, to a remarkable extent, on an assumption that birth control would be used in the service of a particular kind of family for the broader public good. Married couples would use contraception responsibly; marriages would become stronger; children would be wanted and adequately provided for; everyone would benefit. The problem, if we can call it that, was that contraceptive control proved useful for purposes that many of its advocates had not necessarily envisioned. Women could use it to postpone marriage and motherhood indefinitely. Unmarried people could have sex while reducing the risk of pregnancy. Feminists could understand reproductive control not simply as a tool for creating happier marriages but also as a precondition for women’s liberation from patriarchal institutions. Once contraception escaped the tidy boundaries of the postwar family’s picket fence, the religious consensus surrounding it became much harder to sustain. It certainly did not help matters that, in exactly this historical moment, the politics of American religion itself became far more polarized.

This is where God Bless the Pill becomes particularly useful for thinking beyond our usual categories of “pro-birth control” and “anti-birth control.” The history Mehta tells is not simply one in which religious Americans changed their minds. Contraception itself changed its meaning depending on who was using it, who was regulating it, and what they hoped it might accomplish. Religious liberals could embrace family planning while remaining uncomfortable with sexual liberation. Feminists could fiercely defend access to contraception while criticizing the medical system that provided it. Women of color could demand reproductive autonomy while also challenging population-control programs and coercive uses of contraception. And religious conservatives could increasingly associate birth control with social transformations they opposed. There was never just one politics of contraception.

I occasionally found myself wishing that some of these strands overlapped even more visibly throughout the book. The various stories Mehta tells were unfolding at the same time, and sometimes the book’s hybrid thematic-chronological organization makes them feel a little neater than things were. I also, selfishly, wanted more of the controversy over the pill’s safety and side effects. That may admittedly be an occupational hazard for a historian who spent too much time thinking about Barbara Seaman. But the women who criticized the pill’s risks in the late 1960s and early 1970s provide an especially good example of the categories Mehta’s book helps us complicate. They were not “against” contraception. They wanted safer contraceptives, better information, and more authority for women over the medical decisions involved in using them. If anything, that story underscores Mehta’s larger point that attitudes about contraceptive technology do not necessarily tell us very much, on their own, about someone’s broader sexual politics.

That complexity is what makes God Bless the Pill such a useful book. At just four chapters, it is also compact enough to put into the hands of advanced undergraduates without terrifying them, while opening up much larger scholarly conversations about religion, sexuality, gender, race, medicine, and the family. More importantly, it disrupts a story that has become so familiar that it can seem almost natural: religious people oppose contraception; secular people embrace it; feminists fight for access; conservatives fight against it. Mehta shows instead that religious Americans helped make contraception respectable in the first place.

Seaman’s critics, then, make considerably more sense at the end of Mehta’s book than they did at the beginning. To assume that a woman criticizing the pill must be Catholic and “working for the Pope” was to assume that religion and contraception belonged naturally on opposite sides of a political divide. They never did. God Bless the Pill shows us instead a twentieth-century America in which religious people could champion birth control, even as its very meaning was constantly being negotiated and renegotiated. The history of contraception was never simply a fight between people who believed in birth control and people who did not. The more interesting question is who and what people thought contraception was for – one that, as our contemporary politics increasingly remind us, is hardly settled history.

Notes

1. Barbara Seaman, interview by Elizabeth Watkins, January 30, 1994, transcript in author’s possession. ↑

---

Featured image caption: Photo by cottonbro studio.