The main emphasis here is on family planning for married couples but how Irish women belatedly accessed reliable fertility control is also part of the wider story of how women’s place in Irish society changed. After two fairly broad chapters on (a) features of Ireland’s fertility pattern and (b) the changes that happened in the 1960s, the book takes a chronological approach.
Mary Daly regards 1968-73 as a key period in the story: the disappointment caused by the papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae, was followed by the opening of family-planning clinics and the challenging of the ban on contraception in the courts and the Oireachtas. Two chapters are then devoted to 1973-79, which saw the expansion of family-planning clinics and efforts to legalise contraception (with grassroots’ opposition emerging in rural areas). This culminated in the 1979 Family Planning Act legalising contraception “for bona-fide family-planning purposes”, privileging “natural methods”, which was clearly aimed at placating the Catholic Church.
The 1983 constitutional amendment on abortion is seen by Daly as “an attempt to reinstate the image of Ireland as a morally conservative Catholic state”. Despite it, the 1980s saw a marked increase in access to contraception and major advances in medical family-planning education. The book concludes in the mid-1990s, with the disappearance of legal and practical restrictions on contraception (though many women continued to travel to Britain for abortions). A series of scandals during that decade seriously damaged the Catholic Church’s standing.
Daly says that her book “records a peculiarly Irish aspect of a wider history of change in the second half of the 20th century”. Religion and national identity were twin intrinsic parts of that aspect, as was the notion of Irish exceptionalism. Particularly interesting and revealing are the references to and comparisons with Northern Ireland: there was considerable common ground between the two parts of Ireland, and between Catholics and Protestants, on sexual mores but deep-seated divisions meant that this common moral ground wasn’t recognised or deployed.
“Central to the history of family planning in Ireland is the interaction between religious observance and expressions of Irishness, and how that changed in response to domestic political and socio-economic developments, and to international forces,” she concludes in this insightful analysis based on comprehensive research in a wide range of archival and other sources.
