Writing in Woman’s Way magazine in 1966, journalist Monica McEnroy drew attention to the plight of many Irish women who were unable to avail themselves of contraception. She wrote that she had received letters from women all over Ireland ‘who had asked their doctors for the Pill and had been refused’.Footnote ¹ One woman, writing to McEnroy, explained:

McEnroy argued that women like the author of this letter should be allowed to decide for themselves with regard to birth control, and that the religious aspect was ‘a matter between me and God’.Footnote ³

This chapter builds on important recent accounts of the contraceptive pill in other predominantly Catholic countries with similar restrictions in place.Footnote ⁴ I will focus on three key themes: first, contemporary attitudes to the contraceptive pill in Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, the experiences of Irish women who chose to take the contraceptive pill and the role of medical authority surrounding the pill. I seek to show here that, through negotiating access to the contraceptive pill, Irish women were also negotiating both their marriage dynamics and relationships with the medical profession. Ultimately, the loophole regarding the prescription of the contraceptive pill as a cycle regulator in the period before 1979 placed Irish GPs in a position of significant power over women’s access to contraception.

4.1 Women’s Accounts and Doctors’ Authority

The contraceptive pill was available in Ireland on prescription from 1963 and marketed as a cycle regulator and, as Mary E. Daly has argued, ‘played a crucial role in opening a debate on contraception’.Footnote ⁵ Users of the contraceptive pill could circumvent the ban on contraception in Ireland by asking for the pill as a cycle regulator rather than as a contraceptive. In Spain, where contraception was banned until 1978, the contraceptive pill was also marketed as an ‘oral cycle regulator’ or as an ‘ovulostatic’, and during the 1970s, marketing materials and package inserts continued to inform patients that these drugs ‘should be used to allow for “periodic rest of the ovaries”’.Footnote ⁶ Similarly, in Ireland, a 1967 advertisement for oral contraceptive Lyndiol 2.5, which appeared in the Journal of the Irish Medical Association, advertised the drug ‘for a menstrual cycle as regular as clockwork’.Footnote ⁷ The advertisement (Figure 4.1) shows a woman’s hand with a watch; the woman is wearing a wedding ring. As Elizabeth Siegel Watkins has illustrated, by the mid-1960s, the use of contraception by single women was frowned upon by some ‘because it implied, correctly, not only that these women were having sex but also that they were planning ahead for it’.Footnote ⁸ There were similar attitudes in the UK; and in the first years of its introduction there, the contraceptive pill was restricted to married women.Footnote ⁹ Furthermore, GPs who did provide contraception usually did not prescribe it to single women. However, some women found ways to circumvent this, through attending a sympathetic GP or lying about their marital status.Footnote ¹⁰ This practice was occurring within a wider context, from the 1960s, of increasing patient autonomy and consumerism.Footnote ¹¹

Figure 4.1 Advertisement for Lyndiol 2.5, Journal of the Irish Medical Association, volume LX, no.365, November 1967.

Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Between 1966 and 1967, it was estimated that there had been a 50 per cent increase in the usage of the pill in Ireland, with four anovulent brands available in 1966 and at least ten in 1967.Footnote ¹² In 1967, Syntex Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturers of more than half of the contraceptive pill brands, estimated that 12,000 Irish women (three out of every hundred) were taking the pill, and by the following year, this was estimated to have risen to five out of every hundred.Footnote ¹³ Given that the contraceptive pill was the only artificial contraceptive available from GPs in Ireland pre-legalisation, albeit through the use of coded language, it became an important emblem in debates around the legalisation of family planning in the 1960s and 1970s. This also occurred in Britain where general debate about access to contraception was increasingly about access to the pill. The word ‘pill’ was frequently used in the press as a synonym for contraception and vice versa by the early 1970s.Footnote ¹⁴

In Ireland, as in other Catholic countries with similar legal restrictions on birth control, the contraceptive pill featured heavily in media debates surrounding family planning. In Spain, the first references to the contraceptive pill appeared in the publications ABC, Blanco y Negro and Triunfo from 1964.Footnote ¹⁵ In the Spanish press, physicians dominated the debate on the contraceptive pill in the 1960s and 1970s; their focus tended to be on the side effects of the pill.Footnote ¹⁶ In Poland, where there was no ban on contraception, information about the pill had circulated in popular magazines such as Przyjaciolka since 1960.Footnote ¹⁷ In Portugal during the same time period, debates over the contraceptive pill highlighted the dissatisfaction of a significant proportion of Portuguese elites towards Catholic authority over matters relating to sexuality.Footnote ¹⁸ In Ireland, magazines such as Woman’s Way played an important role in illuminating the experiences of ‘ordinary’ Irish women and their views on the ban on contraception, as well as the importance of marriage dynamics, sympathetic doctors and the Catholic Church.Footnote ¹⁹ There was also widespread coverage in popular Irish television programmes. Indeed, several respondents recalled hearing about the pill on television. Christopher (b. 1946) remembered the pill being discussed on The Late Late Show, while Ellen (b. 1949) recalled the pill being publicised in ‘an Irish programme [most likely The Riordans] and one of the women in the programme she was going to take the pill, and it was a big thing, you know, they made a big storyline out of it’.

In an article on women’s experiences of family planning in Woman’s Way magazine in 1968, Monica McEnroy interviewed a woman called Mrs Kearney, the mother of three children, who had been refused the contraceptive pill by her doctor. According to McEnroy, Kearney wanted ‘to have the same facilities for living her married life in peace and harmony with her husband and three children as her sister in England’, and she argued, ‘No hospital has the right to make me obey these regulations. I am the one to decide what is necessary for my family.’Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, in a subsequent article, McEnroy drew attention to the fact that ‘a hopeful percentage of doctors are prescribing anovulants. They could help desperate women in the less enlightened areas.’Footnote ²¹ McEnroy advised readers to contact her with the names of sympathetic doctors so that she could devise a list of doctors who ‘the women who send the sad fan mail to this page can be advised to contact’. Readers were encouraged to ask their doctor if they would ‘help Woman’s Way to help readers whose family life or health is suffering from lack of reliable conception control’ with the understanding that their name would never appear in print.Footnote ²²

Women’s accounts of the contraceptive pill thus were an important element of debates in the printed media around contraception in the 1960s and 1970s. This was in part because the fact that the contraceptive pill was dissociated from the act of sexual intercourse meant that it became an easier vehicle for discussion, unlike, for instance, condoms that continued to have an association with sexually transmitted diseases.Footnote ²³ Alluding to this, Professor Dermot Hourihane (1933–2020), a professor of pathology and one of the founder members of the Fertility Guidance Company, explained:

As Hourihane’s testimony suggests, oral contraceptives often appealed to women because of their reliability and independence from the act of sexual intercourse, while they were not interruptive or messy compared to other forms of artificial contraceptives.Footnote ²⁴ In feminist magazine Wicca, published in 1977, Ann O’Brien discussed how she had decided to go on the pill after moving into a flat and deciding ‘that I wanted to enjoy myself and feel safe’. In contrast to other forms of contraception, such as condoms and the cap, she felt that the pill had an advantage of reliability and ‘because the Pill is oral it is inclined to be separated from sexuality, which in part explains its success in a sexually repressed country like Ireland, but also it means there is no temptation not to use it involved, it’s just a matter of remembering to take it all the time whether active sexually or not’.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, writing in her 2013 memoir, a founder member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, Mary Kenny, explained how, in a conversation with her mother many years after the 1971 Contraceptive Train protest, she realised her mother ‘wasn’t against the Pill; I think this was because the Pill was discreet, and clinical, and removed from the act of sexual intercourse’. On the other hand, her mother ‘couldn’t talk about condoms’ because of their association with venereal disease.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, the popularity and acceptability of the contraceptive pill must be understood within the broader historical context where new pills were becoming available on prescription to treat a variety of health issues.Footnote ²⁷ The pill could also be bought in six-month supplies and potentially taken without the male partner’s knowledge.Footnote ²⁸

Although the contraceptive pill became available in Ireland from 1963, access remained difficult for the majority of Irish men and women. As John Horgan, in an article in Fortnight magazine in 1970, surmised:

Working-class women were most likely to be severely affected by a lack of access to the pill; if their local GP would not prescribe it, then these women were often reliant on public postnatal care at a maternity hospital where they might potentially obtain a prescription.Footnote ³⁰ Two of the three major maternity hospitals in Dublin – the Coombe Lying-in Hospital and the National Maternity Hospital (NMH) – were Catholic hospitals, with Archbishop John Charles McQuaid acting as governor of their boards.Footnote ³¹ From 1963, the NMH in Dublin established a family planning service to provide advice ‘in conformity with Catholic moral teaching’.Footnote ³² In his 1964 report on the Family Planning Clinic of the NMH, Dr. Declan Meagher stated that the clinic had been set up as a result of ‘an increasing awareness of the real personal problems which uncontrolled fertility presented to many patients’. Patients attending the clinic in its early years were solely advised on methods ‘related to those of the infertile period’ and were given a forty-five-minute educational talk on responsible parenthood and the infertile period, which included a short educational film. Meagher estimated that almost 4,000 patients ‘mostly from the lower socioeconomic groups’ had attended the talks.Footnote ³³ In his 1966 report on the work of the NMH Family Planning Clinic, Meagher acknowledged that while the safe period ‘meets the needs of many couples, it is inadequate in serious medical and social cases’.Footnote ³⁴ The Coombe Hospital also provided advice through a ‘Marriage Guidance Clinic’ from 1965.Footnote ³⁵

The Rotunda Hospital was not Catholic but the vast majority of its patients were Catholic owing to its location.Footnote ³⁶ It appears to have referred some patients to an appropriate consultant for family planning advice but its 1962 report stressed that this was only in cases with extreme socio-economic factors; patients were also ‘given the opportunity of discussing such problems with the Hospital Chaplains’.Footnote ³⁷ A formal Family Planning Clinic was established at the Rotunda in January 1966, with Eleanor Holmes of the Social Work department stating ‘the guidance it gave was much sought for and needed by patients with severe social problems, as well as on medical and obstetric grounds’.Footnote ³⁸

Women’s accounts of the contraceptive pill often contrasted it with natural methods of birth control such as the rhythm method. Máire Mullarney, a founder of the Fertility Guidance Company, asked her doctor for the pill in 1964. Writing in 1992 she said ‘I asked our doctor for the Pill right away. I did not consult anyone with a Roman collar. I might not have picked one who read the more adventurous journals’.Footnote ³⁹ Her memoir expands on the benefits of the pill in contrast with the natural methods she had previously been using:

For Mullarney, the contraceptive pill provided a much-needed respite from the anxiety of worrying about falling pregnant, in contrast with the rhythm method, which restricted sexual intercourse to infertile days. She was not unusual in finding the rhythm method problematic. As Dr. Dermot MacDonald and Dr. Declan Meagher, the two doctors who ran the family planning clinic at the NMH in Dublin, explained in a 1967 article, the rhythm method required couples who had recently had a baby to abstain from intercourse until regular menstruation returned, which could be 5–6 months after birth in some cases.Footnote ⁴¹ This combined with the fact that couples were also advised to refrain from intercourse in the last two months of pregnancy, meant that the rhythm method imposed ‘an intolerable strain on many marriages’.Footnote ⁴² They explained that by this point, the policy of the clinic was to prescribe “the pill” as a contraceptive ‘for selected medical and social cases’ and emphasised that advice on family planning should be freely available to all mothers, with fear of pregnancy being detrimental to marital harmony.Footnote ⁴³ Dr. Niall Tierney, writing in response to the article, asked for further elucidation on the comments made by Meagher and MacDonald, particularly as the prescription of artificial contraception such as the pill was ‘directly opposed to the official view of the Catholic Church’. In response, Meagher and MacDonald insisted that they did not advocate the pill. In their view:

Contemporary newspaper accounts suggest that the contraceptive pill was also being readily prescribed by general practitioners in Ireland – this involved doctors making a private agreement with patients. In 1968, the marketing director of Syntex Pharmaceuticals, Ronald Levin, stated that from ‘the conversations we’ve had with doctors in the Republic [ … ] the majority of general practitioners in Ireland are prescribing the Pill for social reasons’.Footnote ⁴⁵ One Dublin gynaecologist explained to journalist Mary Maher in March 1968 that ‘more and more general practitioners are prescribing it, and very few doctors would refuse it now to any woman who asks for it’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Another pharmaceutical company representative stated that he believed that 25 per cent of Irish women taking the pill were doing so for ‘medical reasons’, and 75 per cent for ‘social reasons’, with the firm’s spokesperson joking ‘Either that or there’s a great increase in menstrual difficulties’.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, the spokesperson quickly added that the company was strictly adhering to Irish legislation around contraception and that ‘chemists are just as strict about following prescriptions exactly’, stressing that ‘the great majority of doctors are deeply concerned and very anxious for a decision from Rome’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, as Lara Marks notes, ‘the widespread expectation of imminent change during the early 1960s had in itself led many Catholics to decide to use the pill before the encyclical was published’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Dr. Kieran O’Driscoll, master of the NMH, stated that ‘It is no exaggeration to say that our position in continuing to withhold this most effective and now widely accepted method, particularly in ill women, causes a serious problem of conscience for me and for other members of our medical staff. One can only hope that clear guidance will not be much longer delayed’.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, with the publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968, the NMH no longer prescribed the pill. In a July 1968 letter written by Dr. Kieran O’Driscoll, master of the hospital to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, O’Driscoll assured the archbishop that the ‘Papal Encyclical is accepted as an explicitly clear directive on the subject of birth control, which will be adhered to’.Footnote ⁵¹ As Deirdre Foley has argued, ‘While the behaviour of Catholics was increasingly related to personal conscience, rather than Catholic dogma, the influence of this teaching at Catholic maternity hospitals was, however, a hindrance to those who sought access to the pill’.Footnote ⁵²

Following the introduction of the encyclical, some Irish doctors now faced a new dilemma. Humanae Vitae came at a crucial moment in terms of the history of birth control – the question of contraception had become the topic of heated debate, particularly with the advent of the contraceptive pill in Europe from the early 1960s, but now that Church guidance was clearly against contraception, doctors had to make a choice over whether they felt they could prescribe it. According to one article in the Irish Times in 1968, ‘for a number of years now, since the introduction of the pill, the doctors have been unwillingly carrying a certain moral responsibility’. The piece stated:

However, now that the moral position was made clear and Catholic couples were forbidden from using artificial contraception, the article asked, ‘has the responsibility of the Catholic doctor changed?’Footnote ⁵⁴ As a result of the lack of other contraceptive options, some sympathetic general practitioners prescribed the pill to women who had experienced numerous pregnancies. Writing in the Journal of the Irish Medical Association in 1969, Dr. Declan Meagher highlighted the difficult position that the Irish ban on contraception posed for doctors. He argued that the role of the doctor was to bring ‘sympathy and understanding’ to couples with problems controlling their fertility. Meagher believed that the primary responsibility of doctors was to decide on the best medical treatment for the patient. He argued that for some Irish patients and doctors, Humanae Vitae was not an infallible statement.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Meagher’s view:

Meagher’s testimony highlights the difficult dilemma faced by some Irish doctors. The use of a case of a woman with multiple children as an example, was typical of evidence put forward in favour of the legalisation of contraception at the time. Many doctors, however, were conflicted. At a Medical Union conference in 1971, for instance, one doctor asked, ‘Am I to condemn a woman to Purgatory in this life by refusing her the Pill? Or am I to condemn myself to Purgatory in the next life by prescribing whatever contraceptive she asks for?’Footnote ⁵⁷ Others such as Professor William Dwyer, a kidney specialist at Jervis Street Hospital, stated at a meeting organised by the Irish Family Planning Rights Association in 1971, that for some doctors ‘it would be morally and professional irresponsible to recommend the safe period or rhythm as a total protection to any woman against any pregnancy in the future’.Footnote ⁵⁸ For many doctors the issue was a delicate one. At the Medical Union conference in Sligo in 1973 two motions which were put forward with regard to contraception, firstly, to ask the Minister for Health to establish family planning clinics in the health board areas, and secondly, to ask for the lifting of the Irish law forbidding the sale of contraceptives, allegedly descended into chaos.Footnote ⁵⁹ The union failed to come to an agreement on the issue and was criticised in the Irish Medical Times for ‘shirking its responsibility’ to members of the public who looked to doctors for guidance and help.Footnote ⁶⁰ In any case, the situation with regard to the pill placed Irish doctors in a unique position of power.

4.2 Attitudes to the Pill

Oral history evidence suggests that there was significant stigma attached to taking the pill and negative attitudes towards women who were being open about taking it. Martina’s (b.1955) testimony, for instance, highlights both of these points:

When I asked why people were so shocked by this behaviour, Martina explained, ‘I supposed what shocked us about it was that she was open about it. I mean, this wasn’t something you were going to say in company that you were on the pill. You’d keep it to yourself if you were on the pill’. Similarly, Alice (b.1944) from the west of Ireland stated that ‘We thought that going on the pill was just unbelievable. There was one girl that came to live in our place, and she was on the pill. It was nearly the same as having leprosy, we thought so’. Likewise, in a 1968 article by Monica McEnroy, thirty-six-year-old Angela, who was described as married with six children and living on a farm, explained ‘I went on the pill in England this time last year. I was over in Devon with my sister. It is a nuisance having to go to Dublin every six months to get a check-up but sure it is only twice a year after all. I would not say a word about it around here’.Footnote ⁶¹

There appear to be significant generational differences in terms of attitudes to the pill. Some interviewees asserted that women of their generation did not take the pill, implying that it was a practice of younger generations. For instance, when I asked Nuala (b.1935) from Dublin if she had ever heard of anyone taking the pill, she commented: ‘Not in my day, definitely not. No. Would have maybe years after, but would be younger people then of course. Not in my day, no. There was no talk. […] No. It was a different world.’

Similarly, when asked about whether she knew of anyone taking the pill in the 1960s and 1970s Úna (b.1944) told me: ‘I don’t think so. Not in my day. I don’t think the pill was available. […] Just behaved yourself.’ Úna’s comment ‘Just behaved yourself’ is revealing because again, it suggests that the pill brought sexual freedom to younger women, but also implies that she and her contemporaries led more chaste lives. Moreover, the above accounts resonate with Kate Fisher’s findings that many of the women she interviewed maintained ignorance or naivety around the issue of birth control, because ‘ignorance implied moral purity, innocence and respectability’.Footnote ⁶²

Several respondents also referred to their mothers’ attitudes to the pill and how this impacted on their own views. Ellen (b.1949) from the southeast of Ireland, reflected ‘my mother being so religious, she told me if even when I got married, she said if I was taking the pill that I wasn’t to come home anymore’. Similarly, Catherine (b.1953) from the southwest of Ireland, took the contraceptive pill before she got married in 1975. She recalled a heated conversation with her mother after she got married. After Catherine told her mother she was on the pill, her mother stated ‘Oh, you’ll be condemned, weeping and gnashing your teeth. It’s a mortal sin!’ Other mothers had a different attitude and reflected on how different things were for their daughters than their generation. Marian (b.1935) who came from a large family from a rural area in the north of Ireland, told me:

Some respondents also recalled their concerns around the side effects of the pill. Indeed, as Lara Marks has shown, medical experts in the UK and United States vigorously debated the side effects of the pill, in particular, thrombosis, during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ⁶³ Professor John Bonnar, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at TCD, who conducted research into thrombosis and the pill, explained in an oral history interview ‘I think the pill was a major advance. But we’ve an obligation, when it’s being taken by young, healthy women, to see that it’s as safe as possible. And its history, in that regard, is not anything to be proud of.’ Moreover, it is evident from oral history testimonies, that concerns about the side effects of the pill seeped into the consciousnesses of many women. Audrey (b.1934) from Dublin recalled that when the pill came out in the 1960s, ‘you heard horror stories of girls dying from it and all’. Indeed, discussions of the side effects of the pill had an influence on women’s attitudes to family planning options. Winnie (b.1938) from a small town in the north of Ireland, explained that she would not have taken the pill had it been available to her because ‘I wouldn’t interfere with my body in that respect. I would have been too scared’.

Given the stigma attached to the contraceptive pill, women who decided to take it tended to keep this information to themselves. Cathy (b.1947) decided to take the pill before she got married in 1974. She told me:

She believed that she would ‘be vilified, I’d say if they thought I was doing that. Desperate, like’. Similarly, when asked if she knew anyone who had taken the pill, Julia (b.1936) explained to me ‘Well, I would say that in those days, even if they were, they weren’t going to … Say it. No I wouldn’t think so, no’. Likewise, Judith (b.1950) who went on the pill before she got married aged 25, told me ‘It wasn’t something you’d advertise or go around telling’. Similarly, Brigid (b.1945) explained ‘people were very reticent to talk about it at the time. People wouldn’t admit at all to doing anything remotely like that’.

In addition, as one young woman writing into Nikki magazine in 1973, commented ‘getting the pill is not an easy thing’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Women who wished to obtain the pill were reliant on a sympathetic doctor, or could have obtained it at one of the urban-based family planning clinics. Annual reports from the IFPA illustrate the prevalence of the contraceptive pill as a family planning method for IFPA patients at Dublin clinics, as will be discussed in further depth in Chapter 6. Doctors therefore had significant authority in deciding who could be prescribed the pill. Similarly in Spain, the circulation of the pill in the 1960s and early 1970s helped to ‘reinforce the doctor’s technical and gender power position’.Footnote ⁶⁵ According to Monica McEnroy, Woman’s Way magazine received letters every week ‘asking where a doctor can be found who will prescribe the Pill’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Knowledge was disseminated between women about which doctors would prescribe the pill and which would not, as well as what to say in order to obtain it. Myra (b.1947) for instance, explained to me:

Similarly, Christopher (b.1946) from a rural part of south-east Ireland told me ‘You would have, it would be diagnosed for not contraception but for, for other reasons, for supposedly some other reason … You would get an understanding GP who would say – “Ah yes, I can see this now and this will fix that” and it would be nod, nod, wink, wink’. There is also evidence to suggest that some women from working-class backgrounds possessed knowledge of how they might gain access to the contraceptive pill. Marian Larragy, a member of the Contraception Action Programme, an offshoot of feminist group Irishwomen United, recalled visiting the residents of flats in Ballymun, one of Dublin’s most underprivileged areas, in order to gain signatures for a CAP petition. She recalled meeting a young mother who had been in her class in primary school who ‘signed the petition and told me that everybody in the flats was getting the pill “to make their periods regular’’’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Other respondents recalled ‘shopping around’ for a doctor who would prescribe the pill. Nicholas (b.1953) who lived in a town in the west of Ireland, explained that his wife initially went to a doctor who refused to give her the pill. In Nicholas’ words ‘he frowned totally on the idea’. However, his wife found another GP who in contrast ‘was well on board towards prescribing the pill … And there was a good engaged team conversation with my wife and her doctor. I thought that was good at the time, looking back on it now … But he was a progressive doctor’. Similarly, Noel (b.1952) believed it was ‘just a case of you just finding the right person’.

Andrew Rynne, who worked as a doctor doing vasectomies for the IFPA, noted in his memoirs that during his time in general practice, female patients regularly asked him if was ‘morally all right’ for them to use contraceptives. In other words, he felt that ‘doctors were sometimes looked upon as kind of surrogate priests, a role that I for one thought quite absurd’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Doctors had significant authority, and as with priests, as will be outlined in the next chapter, there was a sense among some respondents that women could not question their judgement. Maud (b.1947) for example explained ‘In those days you didn’t question the GP really. Like today you go in there now and you look on the internet and you’re reading up and stuff’. Similarly, Ellen (b.1949) asked her GP for the pill after the birth of her fourth child in 1976. She said, ‘when I went to the GP, he just said “I don’t like giving the pill.” But I think if I had pressed him for it, he would have given it to me. Because I think some GPs at the time did give it.’ Indeed, some respondents believed that doctors would only give out the contraceptive pill in extreme circumstances. For instance, when I asked Colm (b.1940) from a rural area in the Midlands, about whether women would have had access to the pill in Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s he replied: ‘Jaysus, you couldn’t. Well I suppose you could go to the doctor and get a, go to the doctor and get a, a cert … to say that if this woman, then … You know the type of thing, or endanger her life, like this’. Similarly, Ellen (b.1949) whose GP refused to give her the pill, explained that some doctors did prescribe it, but only in extreme circumstances:

Aoife (b.1947) explained how she really had to justify her need for the pill to her doctor. She said, ‘I was saying, you know, if you don’t help me, I’m in a mental hospital and so are all my children that’s it because I cannot cope with this, you know. And I’ll disgrace you if you don’t you know and kind of threatened him and this is what I did – I had to fight. [..] I had to learn to fight’.

Doctors clearly had considerable power in choosing whether they would prescribe a woman the contraceptive pill. For some doctors, their status as ‘sympathetic’ was undoubtedly lucrative. It is also clear that women also exhibited agency in finding a sympathetic doctor. Knowledge of sympathetic doctors, and information on what to say, was usually spread through word-of-mouth. Similarly, Leanne McCormick’s important work on abortion in Belfast has shown the significance of women’s networks in the transmission of knowledge about illegal abortion and the restriction of such networks of knowledge within Protestant dominated neighbourhoods.Footnote ⁶⁹ For instance, as Irish feminist campaigner Ruth Riddick, who would go on to establish the Open Door Counselling service for women experiencing crisis pregnancies, explained in an oral history interview to me:

Similarly, Fine Gael politician and member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, Nuala Fennell wrote in her 2009 memoirs that ‘women who identified understanding and helpful general practitioners passed on the word to other women.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Jean (b.1953) from a small town in the northwest explained that ‘And then you would have known there was a GP here, not necessarily your own – one particular GP and you could have gone to him and he would give you the contraception’. Similarly, Sally (b.1956) from a rural area in the east of the country, told me, ‘And there were certain doctors in their area, that would give them, and other’s that wouldn’t. So amongst us, we all knew, just say it was Dr. Riordan who would, and Dr. Murphy wouldn’t. But you dare didn’t tell your mother you were going to Dr. Riordan, because she’d know immediately. But there again, your medical records were not being followed through’. Alison (b.1953) from a Church of Ireland background, referred to the importance of women’s networks in circulating information about the pill. She explained:

However, as Joanne O’Brien, a member of feminist activist group Irishwomen United explained, while ‘There was information shared between women about who you could go to or whatever … I think you had to have a fair amount of self-confidence to go in and ask for something like that’. For women who decided to ask their doctor for the pill, this was an admission that they were having sex. Martina (b.1955) recalled ‘the fear of going to the doctor and asking him to put me on the … To get the pill’. She explained ‘I mean it’s so silly, it’s almost you’re going in and you’re imagining he’s thinking you’re now having sex … And asking for the pill means that you’re admitting you’re actually having sex’. Lizzie (b.1946) was afraid to ask her doctor for the pill for fear of moral judgement. She explained:

Similarly, Alice (b.1944) recalled believing as a young woman that it was a worse thing to be on the pill than to have sex outside of marriage. She went out with a man ‘for a good while, and imagine, I never went on the pill or anything … It was a bigger sin to go on the pill than to have sex’. Women who obtained the contraceptive pill did not necessarily go to their own GP due to fears that they would be refused or that their family would find out about it. Mairead (b.1953) who grew up in Dublin explained, ‘You wouldn’t go to your family doctor. You’d be afraid, they probably wouldn’t tell your parents but you would be afraid, you know that they would’. Mairead instead obtained the pill from the Well Woman Centre. Similarly, Carmel (b.1952) explained that a lot of women would go to a different GP than their regular one because ‘The doctor would know you and your parents, and everything else’.

Several oral history respondents, did however, mention more compassionate general practitioners who put them on the pill without them having to emphasise their personal difficulties. Clodagh (b.1940) from a rural area in the southwest, for instance, got married aged 22 in 1962, having her first child one year later. By 1968, she had six children under the age of four and ten months. Following the birth of her seventh child in 1972, she went on the pill:

Similarly, Nora (b.1940) had a positive experience with her GP in a rural area in the southwest of Ireland. Nora had married in 1967. Her first child was born in 1969 but died two days after being born. She went on to have another child two years later, followed by a traumatic miscarriage, and then another child two years afterwards. She explained that she was offered the pill by her GP in 1974: ‘The doctor gave it to me because he said, seeing as I’d had the miss and all that, he said, “I think you’ve had enough for a while anyway”’. Nora explained to me that she was ‘surprised’ to have been asked if she would like to take the pill ‘because I never expected to get it. I didn’t even ask him for it’. She believed that her doctor ‘felt that I needed it’. Similarly, Evelyn’s (b.1940) general practitioner in a small town in the northwest ‘didn’t think twice’ about giving her the contraceptive pill, however, her testimony suggests that she had to initially mention her personal difficulties in order to convince him: ‘He didn’t even question it – I just said to him, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do…The kids are lovely but…”. He said “I’ll give you a prescription for the pill now.” That was it, there was no discussion, no discussion at all’.

Elaine (b.1950) similarly had a positive experience with her female doctor in a small town in the west of Ireland. Elaine’s marital life was difficult and her doctor was aware of her personal challenges. She recalled her doctor saying, “Here,” she says, “take this. You don’t need that hassle at all.” Elaine explained that she “didn’t know the first thing” about contraception, “all I knew was it would stop me from having kids. That’s all she told me, really. Take that down.” Elaine’s experience was markedly different to Martina’s (b.1955). Martina, from a rural area in the southwest of Ireland, had two children by the age of 20, and was in an abusive relationship where she regularly experienced violence and rape. She felt that, knowing her situation, her doctor should have suggested contraceptive options to her, but he never did:

Martina felt ‘You were left to fend for yourself. I mean that help wasn’t even there. It wasn’t forthcoming. Maybe if he’d been another doctor maybe he would have but not the doctor that I went to, anyhow. And he used to say to me things like, “Did you get rid of that guy yet?”’

Some women reflected on negative encounters with their GPs regarding contraception. Mrs C.W. from Kildare, writing to Woman’s Way in 1971, remarked that ‘every couple should at least expect a sympathetic and understanding hearing from their doctor’ if they were seeking advice on family planning. She felt that this was not the case at that present moment, however, and that ‘one is liable to hear the riot act read if the doctor does not approve of contraceptives’.Footnote ⁷¹ Cathy (b.1949) recalled her cousin who had six children being refused the pill by her GP:

Although Cathy remarked that her cousin was religious, ‘she wouldn’t have asked for it only, she just had enough. She just thought six was enough and she didn’t want to get pregnant again’. Such experiences were not unusual or restricted to Ireland. Maud (b.1947) emigrated to the UK from the west of Ireland in the 1960s. She had a similar experience with her Irish GP in England who refused to give her the pill for religious reasons:

Amongst her Irish friends in England, however, Maud believed ‘A lot of people I knew were on the pill. Oh yeah. And they weren’t with the Catholic doctors’.

Single women may have had particular difficulty in gaining access to the contraceptive pill from general practitioners in Ireland. Indeed, Eimer Philbin Bowman’s 1977 study of first time visitors to a Dublin family planning clinic showed, some doctors were in general unhappy about prescribing the pill for any length of time to an unmarried woman, with one respondent explaining, ‘He said he would give it to me for three months for irregularity but if I wanted it again I would have to go somewhere else’.Footnote ⁷² Some women also perceived that contraception was not available to single women. Annette, interviewed by Emer O’Kelly about her experiences of travelling to England for an abortion, explained that at the age of 24 in 1968, she ‘was so green, that I didn’t think a single girl could go to a doctor and ask for a contraceptive’.Footnote ⁷³ As well as perhaps having difficulty finding a GP that would prescribe the pill, some chemists also refused to stock it, even after legalisation in the 1980s, as will be discussed more in Chapter 9. One GP who practised in a city in the west of Ireland in the 1970s told me: ‘It was illegal, you know. So … but then there were ways and means, you know. I remember that I had a very friendly pal who was a drug rep for one of the companies, you know, who did – I can’t remember which one it was. And he’d always leave you a few boxes, you know, sample boxes. So, there was never a problem’.

Furthermore, there were cases where husbands interfered in women’s access to the contraceptive pill. Aoife (b.1947) told me her husband ‘discovered the pill and he threw it into the fire because that was against our religion and that was his excuse’. One mother of four, writing to Woman’s Way advice column in July 1968 explained that her doctor had stopped prescribing her the pill because her husband had ‘called in to object … on the grounds that “you have to take what is before you in life”’. The agony aunt stated ‘I think that both your doctor and your husband have forgotten that you are the person to decide. I suggest that you make this point quite firmly and cheerfully’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Other women did not tell their husbands they were taking the pill for fear of causing an argument or tension in their marital relationship.Footnote ⁷⁵ One such woman was twenty-eight-year-old Clare, married for six years with four children, and who had been taking the pill for almost a year. She had not told her husband so as to avoid rows and tension in their relationship, as she believed he would not approve. She had tried the safe period but found it to be ‘utterly useless…in fact, my last two children were born while we were using this method’. Clare expressed her relief now that she was taking the pill, stating, ‘It’s wonderful to know that I won’t become pregnant. I was very ill and had a difficult time carrying all my children. I think that I’d have had a nervous breakdown if I’d found myself pregnant again’.Footnote ⁷⁶

4.3 Conclusion

Evidently, debates around the contraceptive pill in 1960s and 1970s Ireland were complex. As in England, the contraceptive pill became a synonym for contraception more generally, and a means for the press to discuss the issue. The fact that some women could obtain the contraceptive pill through lying about their menstrual difficulties, illustrates the significant hypocrisy of the Irish ban on contraception, but also shows how some women found ways to resist the ban. Moreover, some doctors, through lack of other options, were prescribing the pill to women who might have been better suited to an alternative form of contraception. Women who took the contraceptive pill evidently displayed considerable agency and resistance in gaining access to it, and the circulation of knowledge regarding how to get access, and from whom, shows the importance of women’s networks in helping women to circumvent the legislation. Nevertheless, attitudes towards women who were taking the pill indicate significant stigma towards individuals who used birth control, and women who took the pill were often forced to keep this secret. Finally, and as will be discussed more in the next chapter, the decision to take the contraceptive pill could sometimes result in a dilemma with regard to conscience for Catholic women, however, such women often justified taking the contraceptive pill for economic reasons.