How the Pill Liberated My Mother . . . and Me

My father once told me that I was a "mistake." Not a mistake in the sense of: "We wish you'd never been born." But a mistake as in: "We didn't plan on having you."

There were probably better ways to have conveyed this message to a child. But my father grew up in mid-century Newark, N.J., the son of an Irish barkeep. He hailed from deep in the heart of Philip Roth territory and they didn't mince words back then.

Whenever I asked my mother if I was an "accident" -- as I did from time to time -- she'd fob the question off awkwardly. "You were a planned accident" she'd say with a chuckle, trying to reassure me. But her laughter belied the truth.

I remember once asking my mother when I was still fairly young what was the most important invention that had happened in her lifetime. I was expecting to hear something like penicillin or the atom bomb. Instead, the answer she gave surprised me. She said that it was the invention of the birth control pill.

I was probably 8 or 9 at the time and didn't even know what birth control was. She explained that it had liberated women by not forcing them to have children that they didn't want or couldn't care for.

I filed that idea away in the back of my head -- as children are wont to do -- but I didn't forget it.

I remembered it a year or two later when I came home from attending Mass with my father with an "Abortion is killing" bumper sticker. They were handing them out at the back of church. My mother took one look at it and burst into tears. I didn't know what abortion was, but her tears left a searing mark.

And I remembered it again a few years after that, when she finally explained the reason she'd left the Catholic Church in 1966, shortly after I was born. Before that, she'd been a devout Catholic all of her life, attending Catholic schools all the way through college. But, as she explained, after having four children in eight years, she didn't want to go on feeling obliged to have more kids. So she left the church and, as I subsequently came to learn, went on the birth control pill.

I doubt that many mothers today, myself included, would be as forthright with their daughters about these kinds of topics at such an early age. But that's a testament to just how important the pill -- which 50 years ago this month was approved by the FDA -- was to her as a symbol of so many different things: liberation from prevailing social norms, liberation from the strictures of her religion, liberation from the sexual politics of her marriage.

As with all forms of liberation, I suspect there was some ambivalence as well. Perhaps that's why she stored her pills in a nearly abandoned refrigerator in our basement, which I opened out of curiosity one afternoon in my youth. They kept company with a few bottles of old beer that nobody ever drank. Who knows? Maybe she just didn't want the kids asking too many questions. Or maybe it was just a way to avoid an ongoing source of tension with my father. But I've subsequently wondered whether the pills' ignoble, subterranean status in the bowels of our house spoke to some deeper sense of shame.

I don't know the answer to that. Perhaps I'll ask her. What I do know is that the pill, as it did for so many women of her generation, enabled my mother to take control of her own body and its reproductive function. And it's hard to understate just how revolutionary that was for women of her day.

And through her dogged insistence on the central importance of the pill to women's lives, she also passed those attitudes on to me. I think her early and vocal embrace of birth control had a lot to do why I was - and remain - instinctively pro-choice and pro-contraception, despite my own indoctrination in Catholicism through the age of 18. Birth control has always seemed to me not merely convenient, but also just and empowering.

So thanks for that, Mom.

And Happy Mother's Day.


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