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While the primary focus here is on family planning for couples, it also explores how Irish women belatedly gained access to reliable fertility management. It is part of a broader story that shows how the status of The book takes a chronological approach, with her two fairly extensive chapters on (a) the characteristics of Irish birth patterns and (b) the changes that took place in the 1960s.
Mary Daly considers the period 1968 to 1973 to be a key period in this story. After the disappointment caused by the Pope’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, family planning clinics were opened and challenges to the ban on contraception in courts and in the Oireachtas continued. She then devotes two chapters to his 1973 to 1979 years, a period that saw the expansion of family planning clinics and efforts to legalize contraception (with grassroots efforts in rural areas). A counter-movement is on the rise). This culminated in the Family Planning Act of 1979, which legalized contraception ‘for bona fide family planning purposes’ and privileged ‘natural methods’, clearly designed to appease the Catholic Church. That was the purpose.
The Daily newspaper sees the 1983 constitutional amendments on abortion as “an attempt to restore Ireland’s image as a morally conservative Catholic nation”. Nevertheless, the 1980s saw a significant increase in access to contraception and significant advances in medical family planning education. The book ends in the mid-1990s, when legal and practical restrictions on contraception disappeared (though many women continued to travel to Britain for abortions). A series of scandals during that decade severely damaged the status of the Catholic Church.
Daly says her book “documents a uniquely Irish aspect of the broader history of change in the second half of the 20th century.” Religion and national identity were twin essential parts of that dimension, as was the concept of Irish exceptionalism. Particularly interesting and thought-provoking are the references to and comparisons with Northern Ireland. Although there was considerable commonality regarding sexual practices between her two regions of Ireland, and between Catholics and Protestants, deep divisions prevented this common moral ground from being recognized. or expanded.
“Central to the history of family planning in Ireland is the interplay between religious observance and expressions of Irishness, and how this changed in response to domestic political and socio-economic developments and international forces. ” she concludes with an insightful analysis based on: Comprehensive research in a wide range of archives and other sources.