Contests over Contraception in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico

Contests over Contraception in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico follows how the birth control pill became immoral and centers Mexican Catholics in this history. From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Mexican Catholic bishops, priests, and married couples debated the morality of the pill. Because the pill was primarily a hormonal invention, as opposed to a barrier method, it inspired many questions and debates about the purpose of sex. In the 1960s, the Church was reevaluating its doctrine—including its approach to sex and marriage—amidst modernization, social change, and cultural upheaval. Instead of assuming a monolithic Mexican Church, Contests over Contraception centers on the diversity of Catholic actors and their ideas. I argue that at the heart of these pluralistic debates about the morality of the pill was the contested place of nonprocreative sex in marriage, otherwise known as conjugality, marital intimacy, and pleasure. My work places the question of marital intimacy at the center of these debates, unsettling many of the dominant narratives about the Church in Mexico and Latin America in this period: a critic of economic oppression or a defender of family values. Just as much as the very real economic circumstances led many Mexicans to be concerned with family size, this concern was not mutually exclusive with concerns over marital intimacy and pleasure, as often inadvertently assumed. The fear of couples resorting to abortion was powerful enough to reconcile many of these different concerns and push Mexican Catholics to consider approving the pill.This dissertation demonstrates that this history is much more than one of Catholic dissent or obedience in response to the Pope's prohibition of the pill in 1968. When we turn to Mexico, we see that these debates were about how couples, not individuals, made these decisions about their reproductive lives together. And so, marital intimacy—when and why couples should have sex and whether the pill could facilitate this process—was an important one. Concerns over economic circumstances only raised the stakes. This research suggests that the question of birth control is distinct from abortion, and invites a different set of questions, especially when studied in Mexico. Contemporary terminology used to discuss sexuality and reproduction (such as left/right or pro-life/pro-choice) did not apply to these complex debates in the 1960s. Centering on how Mexican Catholics conceived of conjugality, or pleasure between spouses, moves away from the equally important focus of individual rights and autonomy when discussing reproduction and sexuality. Historicizing how and when the pill became immoral in Mexico suggests reproductive matters were politicized at different rates across the world.