Sheila Suess Kennedy: What family planning has meant to women’s liberation

Morton Marcus and I recently co-authored “From Property to Partner: Women’s Progress and Political Resistance.” When we began working on it, neither of us expected the tsunami ushered in by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson.

We initially wanted to identify and document the scientific and technological changes that facilitated women’s progress—to produce a timeline of sorts. Genuine biological differences between men and women had profoundly shaped human cultures for thousands of years. We wanted to track how science and technology had minimized the social impact of those differences—how changes in the job market made physical strength less important and how various inventions reduced time needed for housework.

We recognized that by far the most important advances were those allowing women to plan, defer or abstain from procreation without the necessity of celibacy. Birth control allowed women to pursue educational and career choices formerly available only to males. Control of reproduction allows women to participate fully in economic, civic and political life.

But that increasing progress—aptly called “liberation”—runs headlong into fundamentalist religious beliefs that continue to influence America’s politics and culture. Although religions (and denominations within them) vary considerably with respect to abortion and gender equity, fundamentalist theologies support a patriarchy that is rooted in history, politics and privilege. They work assiduously to justify the still-significant resistance to women’s personal autonomy and the increasingly frantic efforts of the political right to reverse women’s social, legal and economic progress.

Before the advent of reliable birth control, every sexual encounter carried the risk of pregnancy, and pregnancy generally meant the end of a woman’s economic independence. A pregnant woman was almost always unemployable; for that matter, a married woman in her childbearing years was similarly unemployable, since there was always the possibility of pregnancy and the resulting need to care for offspring, seen as a uniquely female responsibility.

Most women were therefore economically dependent upon the men to whom they were married. (Refusing to marry was no panacea: Unmarried women were routinely labeled “old maids” and were objects of pity and/or derision.) If her marriage was unhappy, or worse, violent, a woman with children was literally enslaved. Given the barriers she faced to participation in the workforce and her resulting inability to support herself and her offspring, she usually couldn’t leave. Absent charitable intervention or inherited wealth—or friends or relatives willing to house and feed her and her children—she was totally dependent on her husband’s earnings.

Access to reliable contraception—and in situations where that contraception failed, abortion—was thus absolutely essential to women’s independence. If women could plan when to procreate, they could also plan when not to procreate. They could choose to schedule or defer motherhood in order to pursue education and career opportunities. The availability of the birth control pill didn’t simply liberate millions of women, opening possibilities that had been foreclosed by reasons of biology. Its availability and widespread use triggered enormous changes in social attitudes that in turn opened the door to legislation that advanced both females’ economic independence and women’s ability to more fully participate in the civic life of the nation.

When the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs, we were presented with an obvious question: How would women respond? What would be the political consequences of returning women to second-class citizenship?

You can probably guess our answer from the title of the chapter we added to our history and analysis of women’s progress: “When Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy.”•

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Kennedy is a retired professor of law and public policy at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI.