Contraception and Modern Ireland

Laura Kelly is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Health and Medicine at the University of Strathclyde and Co-Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH).

'As reproductive rights emerge with visceral relevance on the international stage, Laura Kelly's intervention with Contraception and Modern Ireland provides a timely reminder that playing politics with people's bodies ends in bedrooms, bathrooms and backstreets of fear. This is a history which finds its rhythm in women's words and those of the first interviewee sum up much of the paradox of Irish society's response to contraception in the twentieth century. 'We were awful innocent', Deirdre, a mother of six recalls, 'We were awful innocent'. Indeed, the awfulness often sat in deadly proximity to that innocence causing, until Kelly's book, untold misery, fear, and anxiety. This impressive book charts the history of the last generation in Ireland to live without access to legal contraception. It explores the implications of that legacy, the shifting ground of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the development and impact of reproductive activism, and, through oral history, accesses for the first time the quiet, private and everyday ways women and men negotiated the realities of 'awful innocence' in the bedroom.' Lindsey Earner-Byrne, University College Cork

• Introduction; 1. Access to contraception and family planning information in Ireland from the 1920s to the 1950s; 2. Sexual knowledge and morality from the 1940s to the 1970s; 3. Birth control practices and attitudes to contraception in the 1960s and 1970s; 4. The pill, women's agency and doctor-patient relationships in the 1960s and 1970s; 5. The Catholic Church, 'sympathetic' priests and religious influences on family planning after Humane Vitae; 6. Family planning clinics and activism in the 1970s; 7. Feminist campaigns for free, safe and legal contraception in the 1970s; 8. Campaigns against contraception in 1970s and 1980s Ireland; 9. Family planning after the Family Planning Act: access to contraception in 1980s and 1990s Ireland; Conclusion; Appendix.